


City of Cinder, City of Ash

by simplyprologue



Series: Afterlife in a Northern Town [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, American Politics, F/M, alaska-ever-after
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-27
Updated: 2012-07-27
Packaged: 2017-11-10 19:50:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/470016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tired of her life in rugged Maine, Dartmouth junior Sansa Stark is delighted when her father accepts President Baratheon's nomination to the office of the Vice Presidency. Shirking her life in New England, transferring to Georgetown and quickly evolving into a DC socialite and media darling, her world crumbles around her when her father is charged with treason and is later found dead in his jail cell. Can she save herself from the Lannister Political Dynasty or will she need a little help from Joffrey's bodyguard? TW: Sexual assault.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. City of Cinder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [girlsarewolves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlsarewolves/gifts).



> **Disclaimer:** Not mine. Just playing with them and putting them back roughly in the same shape that GRRM likes to keep them in... Thanks to message_send aka girlsarewolves for the beta!
> 
>  
> 
>  **Update 7/19/13:** I've been unhappy with this fic for awhile. When I wrote it a year and a half ago I was really uneducated on how to handle sexual assault and rape in fiction, and I don't think I treated the topic responsibly or respectfully in this fic. So I've now rewritten it to reflect how it should have been handled--not as a plot device.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The chess game begins.

Like all good stories, hers starts with a death--

Three, to be precise.   
  


* * *

  
She and her father used to play chess every night after dinner. Back when they lived in the house in Maine, with the whitewashed clapboard siding and dark slate roof. The house that looked over the lake, the house with the dogs, the house with her mother and father and sister and brothers.

They were happy, then.

Daddy had taught Sansa when she was young, taught it to her as she sat on his lap in her turquoise bathing suit one summer evening shortly after Ricky had been born. She was eight.

Her hand—thin, fragile, one long scar curving up the crease of her index finger and her thumb—lingers in the air above the white porcelain pawn, before settling over it, the piece cool and smooth under her skin.

She feels poorly for it, hesitating before pushing it forward two squares.

She opens the game using the elephant gambit, staring blankly across the polished marble board, eyes resting unfocused on the leather-backed chair opposite her own. Imagines that it is her Daddy sitting there, with his kind reserved smile, calloused fingers resting behind his line of bishops and rooks.

Ned Stark died two months ago. _Suicide_ , they had told her. Betrayed his country and hung himself from the pipes in his cell. _Might as well have beheaded him_ , the pictures had been splashed across every DC tabloid. It was a public hanging. She wishes to cry but has forgotten how.

_Suicide._

She does not believe these people’s words anymore. She believes nothing, anymore, besides what little her eyes can tell her from watching the horrible deeds of others. 

When she was small, and they would play after dinner in the evenings of those far gone, those dense summer evenings, she would make up stories to go along with their games. Tales of stoic kings and valiant queens and brave knights and wise bishops and the noble pawns who died for their countries.

Poor and sad, they were.

But they had to die so that her king could win.

But her king died.

She had played with Dad at this board once while President Baratheon was alive, during one of their first nights in Washington, after dining with the first family. She had flirted with Joffrey and impressed Cersei and played with Myrcella and had groaned when Dad had asked her to play with him. Complained about being pried from Joffrey's side. She had wanted him so badly, then. Had wanted to be a queen, a mover, like Cersei.  _The queen is the most powerful player on the board_ _. You win with the queen. All the king does is die._

Sansa cannot remember where Arya was during all of this.

Such frantically happy days, before Robert Baratheon’s assassination. Before fingers were pointed every which way, to foreigners and domestic threats and even to the Targaryen, the the ambassador, who had a debt to repay for her father's execution. An assassination, and chaos. 

Sansa questions that now, too. The word assassination is ever so precise. It bleeds like ink, over the night, darkens truth and blankets lies, allows traitors to make escape. 

 _The king_ , she thinks. _The ultimate goal—keep yours alive and topple the other. But, ultimately, useless. Others must do his long-range work for him._

 _The knight_ , her hand flits from piece to piece, weak and listless like an injured bird. _Irrational and erratic, but it can surprise you._

She finds herself to be humming, off-key. It’s some jaunty, sharp melody she cannot recognize, but twines through her head like madness. Like anxiety. Like something hard and black and has curled up in her bones for the winter. It is January now, the month of new starts and grey snow and Election Day.

She flinches, pain shooting up her leg when she twists her foot at the wrong angle.

The White House is very beautiful. The first lady decorated the Residence well. Warm woods and earthy tones accented with sharp, vibrant reds and golds. It is a place that masquerades as a home and is so very unlike the lake house in Maine with its white walls and cotton curtains and old wood floors and touches of Momma’s South Carolina roots.

 _The rook guards the king._ The steadfast man-at-arms, who would die for his ruler. But now she knows that loyalties can be bought and sold like cattle at an auction. The men who served at Robert Baratheon’s pleasure did so at the expense of Tywin Lannister. They shuffled him about from square to square at their behest. Aligned him to be taken out by the shadow bishop, like a novice player easily swayed into checkmate.

She thinks of Sandor Clegane, who wiped the blood from her lip with his handkerchief.

And then she stops thinking about him.

Eyes fogging over, she looks back at the board, where she has played both sides into a stalemate.

 _The queen, the most powerful piece on the board. All other pieces try and emulate her power, but fail._ Cersei Lannister taught her that. The Lannister Political Dynasty from Texas. Tywin Lannister, the reformed son of a Nazi soldier, his mother had escaped in time to bear him on American soil before dying, leaving him to be raised by an aunt. A true American feel-good story, the Lannisters. Everyone loves a good redemption story. No need to make the son pay for the sins of the father.

All they needed was the marriage to make the king theirs. A marriage, and three deaths--

Jon Arryn, who she had never met, but had heard of her entire life. Her father and President Baratheon’s platoon commander in the Gulf War.

Robert Baratheon, who had been fickle, and unobservant, but not whole-heartedly a bad man. But a man who probably could have been, if he had made a bigger effort.

Ned Stark, who had been Vice President after Jon Arryn, who had gone south to serve his brother in arms. Who uncovered Lannister treason. Who was a good man. Who died, like the rest.

Sansa’s fingers graze the pawn again, almost of their own volition. She doesn’t control much of her life anymore, and her body seems to be betraying her in odd ways.

(She tries to forget the feel of Joffrey’s fingers on her hips and his wet breath on her neck and the spark in her belly as she cried and could not believe this was happening to her and it was making her feel like this and she didn’t like it didn’t like it didn’t like it and he laughed at her and left her bloody and bruised in her bedroom in the Residence. She had said no. Joffrey Baratheon did not believe that you could say no after saying yes for months. )

(Clegane had been there, mournful hound-dog eyes watching her as she stood, shaky as a newborn calf, and limped into her bathroom, before the door closed behind Joff and he slipped out of view.)

The pawn, though. just a body to leave on path to victory. The road to power is littered with the corpses of battered women and dead-eyed children, held to be complicit in their own dehumanization. She had said no. It hadn't mattered. Everything she had ever been taught had been a lie. She is a game, to him. 

She trudges along after her first stuttering jump. No one really pays attention to her, but manipulates her just the same. Other pieces block her slow path in their own frenzy to take the others out. They won’t pay attention to her until she’s gotten too close, too dangerous. Until she looks a Lannister in the eye with a knife in her fist, and is close enough to bring it to their throat.

The pawn can be wild. If only because no one cares enough to get inside her head. Her body is their object. She is not a person, not to them. 

And If you don’t pay close enough attention, she can become the queen.

But she has to _survive_ , first.

Her humming grows frantic, more crazed. Sansa has done as told—she has put on one of her shimmery gowns and covered her blemished and bruised skin with her expensive make up and has put on the jewels that were a gift from her keepers. She is a glimmering DC socialite tonight, not the scared college student hiding in the shadows of the liars and thieves who shuffle through the White House every day, petitioning President Tywin Lannister for power and prestige and prizes. 

Joffrey’s prize. Sansa Stark, the daughter of the traitor. The good daughter of the traitor, who is a quiet and complacent pawn who will dance with Joffrey Baratheon at his birthday gala.

His father had been a king. Her father and Jon Arryn, rooks.

The metaphor stutters to a halt in her head, fades and curls at the edges and burns from the outside in—she is not living in a fairytale. This is not one of the movies she would curl up with Momma to watch on rainy days. This is real, and being beautiful or being good in school will not be enough save her.

She must keep her head down.

And do as she’s told.

Because President Lannister has informed the Secret Service and the three-letter-men and the metro police to arrest her if she tries to leave the city.

“The caged bird sings, and it is not so pretty,” a voice from the doorway rasps.

She flinches, and frowns internally, but does not look up. She does stop humming. She does not, however, answer him. She moves the black bishop, pushing him halfway across the board.

The white knight follows him, and she removes the bishop from the board.

Clegane laughs, his hulking frame encompassing all but a fraction of the doorway. “What happened to your voice, little bird?”

Sansa makes an irritated noise low in her throat, hand dancing over the pieces as she contemplates potential moves. “One moment, if you would, Agent Clegane.”

“I’m not Secret Service, girl.”

“It would seem that you are these days,” she answers, plucking the black knight from obscurity and checking the white king. She looks at his face, eyes briefly sticking on the inflamed scars on the right side of his face before flickering back down to the board. “They gave you a suit and earpiece and sunglasses and everything.”

White king moves. Black pawn advances. Bishop blocks pawn. Rook takes bishop. Pawn moves forward.

Check.

The bodyguard who Joffrey refers to as his dog chuckles, a low and harsh sound, like wet gravel under a tire.

(Sansa brushes away the memory of the hearse containing her father’s body pulling out of Leavenworth, the CNN logo on the bottom of the screen, the words _TRAITOR EX-VP NED STARK HANGS SELF_ scrolling unselfconsciously across the bottom.)

She continues moving the pieces mindlessly, the ghost of her father smiling proudly at her from across the board.

“You good at that, girl?” he asks, looking as if he is a moment away from yanking her out of her seat and dragging her downstairs to the party.

Sansa looks down, and moves the pawn to the end, and replaces it with the black’s missing queen.

Checkmate.

She doesn’t answer.

“Come on, girl,” he growls, one huge hand curling around her bare bicep and pulling her out of her chair--not roughly, nearly gentle, but hastily for certain. “East Room, now. Don’t make it more difficult for yourself, not tonight.”

One hour ago, Speaker of the House Stannis Baratheon declared Tywin Lannister’s presidency unconstitutional. In the sixty minutes hence, twenty-one states mobilized their national guards. Two states declared independence.

And all of America is at war.

And it's time for Joffrey Baratheon's birthday party.   
  


* * *

  
The East Room is opulent. It was built to be. _The largest room of the White House, it is used for large press briefings, concerts, ceremonies, and occasionally, a large gala dinner. It houses the White House’s oldest possession, the Landsowne Portrait of George Washington, painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1797, the same portrait that Dolly Madison dragged out with her when the British set the White House ablaze in 1812._

_Originally to be called the “Public Audience Hall,” the founder of the New Republic…_

Sansa’s train of thought peters to a stop when two unsmiling Secret Service agents manning the doors open them for her. She had learned from them in these months passed. Shirk emotion to preform your duties. She wonders how many of them are here because they have no means of leaving. 

Even when Robert Baratheon’s brains had bloomed across the pavement they hadn’t shed their calm, not as the sniper continued picking people off one by one, grey matter splattering like dirty, wet snow on the sidewalk. Even as the memory decayed into a frantic blur, Sansa can remember the look on Dad’s agent’s face as he hurled them into their limousine.

Guarded. Calm. This was something they had learned by rote how to do. She too could learn her role to the point of detachment.

She needs not be announced for her entrance, not like at Daddy’s confirmation party, when they were Vice President Ned Stark and Miss Sansa Stark, she all shiny and new on her father’s arm—so Sansa slips into the crowd as quietly as possibly, Clegane following her wordlessly and dissolving into the sea of tuxedos and evening gowns. She wonders who sent him along to fetch her.

No one needs to talk to her now, nor do they particularly want to, so she walks towards the head table where she is expected to sit until she is instructed to dance.   
  


* * *

  
“Robert’s brothers will not come to the city.” Sansa listens to Cersei, how confident she sounds in this notion, her coloring piqued from the alcohol that once inhabited the empty martini glasses in front of her. “Little shits, they are, but they’re witless. Witless cowards. Neither of them will come north of the Potomac. Just stay in their home districts, bitching to reporters about their dead brother.”

“Congress isn’t in session,” Jaime comments, sitting stiffly in his dress blues. “Won’t be for another three weeks.”

“Stannis Baratheon won’t be saying what he’s saying if he had to say it to our faces,” she continues, eyes combing through the ambassadors and secretaries and White House staff milling about the room.

“He won’t have to, dear sister,” Jaime drolls, contemplating the bottom of his wine glass before draining it. “He’ll being saying it to the House floor.”

“Why aren’t you more worried?” she snaps, a blush rising high on her cheeks. The band returns from its break and the room is filled with music. Jaime shrugs, unconcerned. Cersei rolls her eyes, turning away from her twin. “And you.” Her words are now directed towards Sansa. “Where were you?”

“I felt ill, ma’am. I need to rest a bit before coming down to the party. I didn’t want to cause any trouble,” Sansa answers immediately, hands resting demurely in her lap, fingers twitching in repose.

The woman who had once spoken so kindly to her sneers in response. “We wouldn’t have that, would we? You’re too pale to begin with, you fucking Yankees.”

“I just need a good night’s rest, ma’am.” Not that she would find one. Not now, not since she was forced from their suite at the Hay-Adams, where they had stayed during her father’s brief tenure as President.

The night her father was charged with treason, the night Arya fled into the darkness, the night when she had frozen with fear, and was taken as an unspoken prisoner of war for the Lannisters. Even after President Baratheon had been assassinated in front of her, she had been able to sleep most nights.

Cersei looks her over, blue eyes pinching and prodding Sansa’s slight frame like grubby fingers, pressing dirt and blood into the fabric of her modest blue dress. “Of course.”

Sansa’s eyes are drawn to the couples whirling across the parquet dance floor, laughing and smiling as if nothing is the matter. _They are foolish, she thinks. Like children. None of this will touch them, not here in the city. People will die and lives will be ruined, but they are untouchable, here in this city where dreams are burned to cinder._

She blinks, and for moment, she is wrought by a dizzying haze, her mind reeling as she watches the rooks and pawns and bishops and knights twirl about under the golden lights. She is pawn pinned down by a Queen.

She looks at Jaime.

And a knight.

She does not know why they do not kill her. But, she figures, she is already as good as dead to them. All they have left to do is pull the trigger. For now, she is more valuable alive.

“Dance with me.” A jarring voice plunges into her thoughts, and steals her away from them. “Get up.”

“Of course, honey,” Sansa replies as easily as breathing. It is not so hard, now. The sobs no longer choke down the words. “I'd be delighted."

Joffrey cocks an eyebrow at her.

 _Too much_ , she thinks, chastising herself. She stands, brushing the wrinkles from the folds of her skirt. Her dress is a light blue, like the summer sky, made from silk and satin, the slim bodice tapering in at her waist to meet a grosgrain belt and a flouncing skirt that falls to the middle of her calf. Similar to his mother’s gaze, Joffrey’s eyes are a weight upon her shoulders, pushing her down until she can only look at her shoes and perfectly manicured toes.

His hands clasp down on her wrist and her waist, pulling her out onto the dance floor. _He leaves bruises_ , she thinks. _Leaves bruises on everything he touches._

He dances well, and she gracefully, mutely following his learned, but stiff, lead.

“Look,” Joff says, turning her sharply to look over his shoulder. “Agent Swann and the moron Slynt look like they’re having it out. Dipshits, the both of them. Morons. If they were Secret Service instead of FBI I’d have them out on their asses, or maybe taken out like the dogs they are and shot. 

 _You are but the President’s grandson_ , Sansa thinks. _You control nothing_.

“Their tuxes are probably issued by the boys at the Hoover building. No wonder they all look so trashy." 

 _They’re_ _in uniform. They’re still agents on duty, just like the Secret Service_ , she silently corrects him. The marks that are red and swollen under her meticulously-applied make up throb as he tightens his grip on her. Sansa wonders if he does it subconsciously, or if he does it because he knows he is hurting her.  _And they're not the most effective because your family has run everyone out of DC._

Slynt turns to look towards them by accident, catches her eye, and pales.

 _I hate him_ , she thinks. _He did his job but I hate him_. He stood by while someone hung her father in his jail cell. Slynt brought him into custody and was supposed to stand guard outside his cell, and then shirked all responsibility for Ned Stark’s death without a care, without thinking about how the man was a father and a husband and brother and once the President of the United States. _The world is better for it. Cleaner this way_ , he had said, while she lay on the floor of the Residence, screaming and crying.

She does not want him to think that she will drop her gaze first, instead shifting her eyes slightly, focusing them on Clegane.

He narrows his eyes, but indicates his head towards her with a subtle nod. She nods back, and gives up the illusion of engaging with Special Agent Slynt when she wriggles her fingers at the bodyguard from their position on Joff’s shoulder.

He scoffs at her, before turning his head a fraction, pressing his hand up to the receiver in his ear. Sansa smiles weakly before Joffrey steers her to look in another direction.

Clegane, at least, is predictable. Not that he scares her any less, but Sansa can usually tell what he is going to do--be angry, shout, snarl. But he rarely touches, which is enough for Sansa. 

And suddenly, with a shout, Slynt is on the floor, blood spurting from his nose, Special Agent Hollard looming over him, drunk and belligerent. Sansa’s mouth gapes open as the other agents on duty pull him back. She shuts her mouth quickly as Joffrey hoots in derision. She wonders if the Lord heard her vengeful thoughts.

The crowd gasps as Slynt launches himself up off the floor at Hollard, right fist swinging for the other man’s jaw. Hollard catches his fist, twists it around Slynt’s back, and pushes him through the door out into the service hallway.

Joffrey’s temper swings pendulously from amused to enraged, vibrating from anger. Sansa whimpers as his hands coil tighter around her fine bones, his short nails digging into her skin.

“Oh, fuck!” she can hear Hollard moan from beyond the door, the crowd silent.

 _Hollard’s wasted_ , she observes, wrenching her head almost painfully to observe the scene through the glass panes on the door. She turns her head slightly back to Joffrey, her blue eyes searching his blood-shot green ones, nose wrinkling at the stench of vodka on his breath. _And so is he._

“Bring them to me!” Joffrey yells, indignant.

Swann disappears into the service hallway, returning to push Hollard towards Joffrey, a cruel smile pasted on his face. Secret Service agents milling around the hall pull Slynt back through the doors, and the crowd seems to pull him to the president’s older grandson.

“I should have you both arrested,” he snarls, letting Sansa go from his embrace, but not from his grasp. “Take away your badges and have you blacklisted for attacking the White House.” 

“But we weren’t—”

“It was a stupid—”

“It was all my—”

“You’ll never come back here again,” Joffrey replied, now more haughty than angered. Powerful, and willing to abuse that power. And just plain drunk, and making a scene. “At a time like this, where the country is divided—how do we know that this isn’t just a distraction? My grandfather will hear about this. If you're what we're setting our standard by--if our safety is compromised, I'll compromise yours. I’ll get you charged with treason like that headless Ned Stark, and you’ll be stuck in a jail cell the rest of your life, taking it up the ass until someone slips you the means to slit your--and I can do it, too. My grandfather--”

“Joffrey, no, you shouldn’t—”

“I'm sorry, _what_ did you say to me?”

He purposefully digs his nails into her sky, and Sansa bites her lip to keep from crying out. Oh sweet Lord in heaven, did she really just say that to him?

“Please,” Sansa says, mind frantically running through possible excuses like chess moves on a board. “Please, darling. Have them sent to desk duty or running errands for you, if you wish, but don’t do anything harshly tonight. You wouldn’t want people associating such a thing with your birthday party, wouldn’t you? If you make this a big deal, sweetheart, it’s all people will remember from you party. Not you, or how—how grand and how well it was planned or how jealous they should be. Besides… you want people to think of you as…as merciful. A merciful man is a good man.”

Anything to stop his drunken shouting, to stop the spectacle, to stop everyone’s eyes being drawn to her. This sort of attention has only ever caused her pain, and like a wary animal she wishes to slink away into her corner to lick her wounds.

Joffrey scowls at her, and Sansa shies away, turning head down and away, preparing for the blow. _But he wouldn’t, would he? Not in front of so many people?_

“She’s not lying,” Joffrey’s dog says. Sansa startles, previously unaware of his presence behind her. Joffrey is significantly less surprised. “You’d rather people remember you as kind tonight, not some drunk stupid on the finest vodka the government can buy.” His voice is flat, as if he does not care either way if Joffrey considers his opinion. Does he agree with her? Sansa watches the burned man from the corner of her eye, teeth digging into her bottom lip. Why is he agreeing with her? Why would he save her skin? _He works directly for the Lannisters, he has no Secret Service badge to protect him from the Lannister’s ire._

Unhappy, Joffrey flicks his hand towards the two FBI agents. “Escort them out. I’ll talk to my grandfather about this tomorrow.”

“See?” Sansa says, words escaping her mouth in a rush. “You’re so clever. That was so politically-minded of you.”

He regards her like an owner would regard a nuisance of a pet, surprised at a sudden display of good behavior. “Perhaps you’re not as worthless as Mother said.”  
  


* * *

  
Cersei coos over Joffrey, smoothing his hair back into place as Jaime regards the boy with mild disdain. Sansa watches them carefully, and then smiles tightly at Myrcella as she plops down beside her, sweaty and flushed from dancing.

 _She’ll be a beautiful woman, one day_. Sansa engages her in thoughtless conversation, dropping back into silence when Tommen joins them, and Myrcella becomes occupied with gently teasing her younger brother. _If they don’t cast her down and ruin her._

Like they did to her. However, her mind does not allow her to construct the end of the sentence—she is broken, and tattered, yes, but she is no longer sorry for herself. There is not enough energy in her to be sorry for herself. Such feelings a contradictory to survival. There is no time to feel pity for herself when the Lannisters are waiting for a reason to dispose of her in one way or another.

_Stannis Baratheon should be president._

She’s studied the 25th Amendment and succession politics in school. She is—was, she corrects herself, for Cersei has already told her that she would not be returning for the spring semester—a political science major. She used to carry a copy of the constitution in her pocket.

 (The small moleskin book had been a high school graduation present from Momma.)

Like so many times before, Sansa takes the cold, objectified memory from its shelf in her brain, dusts it off, and replays it like she had simply been yet another American citizen watching the whole thing play out on CNN.

_Jon Arryn dies from a heart attack. Aunt Lysa and Robin flee Washington to their home outside Fort Bragg. President Baratheon asks Daddy to be his Vice President. Daddy accepts. Daddy, Arya and I go south and stay in the Hay-Adams while One Conservatory Circle is prepared. Daddy finds something out about the Lannisters. President Baratheon is murdered on the streets outside the Capital Building. Daddy becomes President. Tywin Lannister is nominated as Vice President, and is confirmed by the House, but not the Senate. Daddy is arrested for treason. Arya disappears._

_Tywin Lannister claims the Oval Office. So does Speaker of the House Stannis Baratheon. But congress has already ended session. Tywin Lannister moves into the White House. I am taken with them. Joffrey is named a Special Advisor to the President. I am raped. Father dies. Stannis declares Tywin Lannister’s presidency unconstitutional._

_Robb and Mother try and find Arya. Negotiate with the Lannisters for my release. Maine mobilizes its National Guard. Jon goes missing while on his mission trip in Siberia._

And the new additions:

_Renly Baratheon, former Secretary of Defense, unites the Southern states against Tywin Lannister, but does not support his brother. Calls for a new election. Texas declares independence. Michigan allies with Canada and declares independence. Twenty six states mobilize their National Gaurds. Mother flies South to meet with Governor Baratheon._

_I am beaten. I shower. I get ready for the party. Tywin Lannister is called to the Situation Room. His cabinet is still loyal to him. Sandor Clegane takes me down to the party._

_And the video stops in her mind, the vision frizzing and devolving into something like static. Like white noise. It does not hurt if she does not allow it to hurt. It is what has happened, and she must live with it._

She went to the White House doctor last month to get the birth control pill.

Joffrey gave her syphilis. She is on an anti-viral. She hasn’t told him that he has it. Perhaps he will go mad.

Sansa is unable to contain a sudden burst of giggles.

Cersei looks at her with a look of disgust flaring over her face, looking at Sansa as if she a bug to be squashed or perhaps a butterfly already pinned to a display board. Pretty, but dead.

“What’s so funny?”

Sansa pales, and casts her eyes to her hands, folded as ever in her lap, hiding amongst the shimmering flounces of her dress. “Nothing, ma’am.”

“That’s right,” Cersei responds coolly. “Nothing is funny. Not when your traitor brother and whore-mother are conspiring against the American government.”

 _Like you aren’t?_ Sansa wants to say. There is an important distinction that Cersei is forgetting: there is the president, and there is the office of the presidency. One can be loyal to one and betray the other. And Robb has not conspired against the American government.

Sansa nods, not quite looking the first lady in the eyes, instead fixing her gaze on her cheekbones. A politicians' eyeline. 

The first lady turns, and looking past her son, addresses her twin. “Father has been gone quite a while. Is he still in the Situation Room? We should go down there.”

“You don’t have Situation Room access,” Jaime answers.

Cersei stares at him. “But you do, _Commander_.”

“Oh _right_ ,” he says, smirking. Jaime rises from his seat, holding out his hand for his sister. As she passes, Cersei grips Sansa’s bare shoulder and uses her long nails to slice into her skin. Sansa does not so much as wince, but blinks, wondering vaguely how this has become normal for her.

Would she ever be able to undo what the Lannisters have done to her—find her way back to normal? Or something resembling normalcy?

She mulls it over in her head.

It is only if she survives, and she cannot dare to hope for that just yet. She is certain that the Lannisters were behind Daddy’s death, and the coroner had ruled that a suicide. No one would be surprised if she were to kill herself as well.

“Sir.” Clegane’s voice pierces his thoughts, his rough voice bringing her out into the world where all the others fade into the static that supports her brain’s wanderings. “Your Uncle Tyrion has returned from Boston.”

Tyrion Lannister passes the head table, inclining his head to his nephew. “Happy Birthday, Joffrey.”

“You,” Joffrey replies over the rim of his champagne flute.

“Me,” Tyrion agrees “although a more courteous greeting might be in order, for an uncle and an elder.”

 They said you weren’t coming back,” Clegane says, the scarred man’s cool slate eyes raking over the man who had been given the moniker ‘the dwarf of Dallas.’

The little man gives the hulking, brutish-looking Clegane a look, a cruel smile twisting at his mouth. Sansa briefly thinks that the two are well-matched in grotesque smiles. “I was speaking to my nephew, not his cur.”

“ _I’m_ glad you’re here,” Myrcella says with a sparkling smile. Sansa remembers what it was like to smile at someone like that. To take joy just from someone’s presence. She wants to reach over and take the girl’s hand in hers, and pray that her mother does not rob her of her innocence and gentle demeanor.

“We share that view, dear child.” Tyrion turns to Sansa. “Miss Stark, I am so very sorry for your loss.”

Sansa cannot think of a word to say back to him, so unused to using her mouth to do anything but fend off Lannister cruelties with demure phrases. How could he be sorry for her? Was he mocking her?

“I’m sorry that my mother and brother… detained you for so long, Mr. Lannister,” she answers finally. Momma had always told her that courtesy was a Southern lady’s armor. Her daughter had been born and raised in New England, but now she was amongst Texan nobility. She will don her armor for however long it will serve her.

“A great many people are sorry for that,” he replies, grinning. “And before I am done, some may be a great deal sorrier… yet I thank you for the sentiment. Joffrey, where might I find your mother? And grandfather?”

“She and Uncle Jaime went to the Situation Room. Grandfather has been down there for hours.” Joffrey gives Sansa an angry look, as if it is her fault that they are there. “The southern states are marching north and Stannis is calling himself president of the United States.”

The dwarf smiles crookedly. “All sorts of people are calling themselves presidents these days.”

Joff, intoxicated as he is, does not know what to make of that statement, but looks at his uncle with an expression steeped in suspicion. “Yes. Well. I’m glad you’re here, uncle. Did you buy me a birthday gift?”

“I brought my wits.”

“I’d sooner have Robb Stark’s head. Or at least his fucking mouth sewn shut,” he spits, flicking the words out irately like he could not be rid of them any quicker. Sansa does not wince as perhaps he expects her to at his words. She watches his face, and finds a rueful truth, and a confirmation of her suspicions. _Not suicide_. Her eyes then drift to Clegane’s—his face is passive, but his eyes meet hers for but a moment before she breaks away, focusing on Joffrey’s tirade again, only to find it over. “Tommen, Myrcella, come. We need to talk to people in mother’s absence.”

Sandor Clegane lingers behind for a moment, eyes raking over Sansa’s frame, pausing on where she knows Joffrey drew blood at her wrist. He turns to Tyrion, and with a small ounce of dark humor, says, “I’d watch that tongue of yours, dwarf, before the little prince decides to get someone to cut it out.”

Sansa tries to square herself against Tyrion’s gaze. His eyes soften on her. “Is it your grief for your father that makes you look so sad?”

“My father was a traitor,” she says at once. “And my brother and mother are traitors as well. I love my fiancé.”

 _You love me_ , Joffrey had hissed over and over as his fist connected with her stomach earlier this afternoon when she was forced to go before the first family in the East Sitting Hall. _Your father was a fucking liar, and now your brother’s gonna die. And you better fucking love me bitch, or I’ll slit your throat myself._

“No doubt.” Tyrion’s words draw her back out. “As loyal as a deer surrounded by wolves.”

“Lions,” she mutters without thinking, envisioning the crest on the ring on Tywin Lannister’s hand. She glances about nervously. It is one thing to converse as such in her head, but when speaking them aloud could earn her a repeat experience of that afternoon…

Tyrion Lannister reaches over the table to her and takes her hand, squeezing it between his stubby fingers. “I am only a little lion, miss, and I vow, I shall not savage you.” Mimicking a bow, he says to her, “Now, if you excuse me, I must find my father. I have urgent business with him.”

Sansa watches him walk out, disappearing and reappearing in the crowd of normal-sized people, before leaving through the wide East Room doors and into the state floor foyer. Finally allowing her eyes to be drawn to the crescent-shaped marks on her wrists and the finger-shaped bruises she knows are forming on her shoulders, she looks nervously about the filled ballroom, and spots Joffrey amongst a gaggle of diplomats.

Breathing purposely through her nose, Sansa pushes herself up from her seat. Once she had loved Joffrey, or thought she had loved him. She had admired his mother and trusted her. And they had both betrayed her family. She could not trust Tyrion Lannister. She could no longer trust pretty words. Steeling her spine, she strides calmly out of the room, whisking around the corner of the foyer and opening one of the hidden doors to the servants’ staircase to the second floor.

Breathing a sigh of relief, she plops down on the second stair. The narrow staircase is plain, the walls a simple light wood with white trimmings. It reminds her of home.

Feeling the tension leave her frame, Sansa reaches down to unclasp the buckle of her strappy high-heeled shoes and pushes them off her tired feet before massaging her twisted ankle.

The sudden jolt of pain sends the memory of Joffrey dragging her down the stairs by her hair back into her mind. It grips her and shakes her like a doll and leaves no air to breathe in the tiny compartment. Massaging her temples, Sansa closes her eyes and breathes as slowly as possible, forcing the memory back onto its shelf.

Pushing back the world, she sits, and she breathes.  
  


* * *

  
“The fuck are you doing back here?” Sandor Clegane growls, stomping down the stairs. He halts a few steps above her, his large body casting a dark shadow on the pine-covered walls. “Girl!”

Sansa pushes herself against the side of the wall. “You can get through.”

“The White House is on lockdown, so no, I can’t get through. I have to sweep the staircases, and lock them down.” He sounds irritated.

Sansa raises her head in surprise. “We’re on lockdown?”

“Didn’t I just say that?” he snaps, making no move to get past her.

“Yes,” she whispers, looking down again, toeing her shoes where they lay, moving them the slightest bit just to do something, anything. “So why aren’t you with Joffrey?”

“Because the brat started getting sick all over himself so I had to drag him to the men's room to keep him from making a mess.” He snorts. “The little prince didn’t want me standing by as he puked his guts out, so he sent me away.”

A weight on her shoulders is relieved, but Sansa keeps her relief strictly internal. If he fell asleep early, he wouldn’t come to her room during the night. “So why are we on lockdown, sir?”

Clegane shrugs, leaning against the wall in the narrow passage. “Probably college students, rioting outside the South Wall." 

Sansa nods and tries to give him a small smile, instinctively covering the fresh bruises and bloodied nail-marks on her right wrist with her left hand. “Probably.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “And don’t call me sir.”

She coughs. “What should I call you, then? Mr. Clegane?”

He snorts, and then shrugs before folding his arms under his chest and indicating at her wrist with his hand. “You should clean those, when you can. His hand was up the French Ambassador’s daughter’s skirt earlier tonight. The ones on your shoulders, too.”

Sansa’s hand tightens around her wrist. The marks are obvious and yet here, in the White House of all places, no one would help her. Say something. Do something. Do anything.

She tries to think of a response, but is not required to when Clegane’s hand flies to his good ear, pressing on the receiver. His face hardens, and then becomes unreadable.

“What?” she asks, voice barely above a whisper. “What is it?”

He laughs then, low and rasping and more jaded and bitter than amused. “Renly Baratheon is leading the National Guards from Virginia and West Virginia into the city. He’s broadcasting on an unscrambled channel—says more are coming.”

“Renly Baratheon is invading the city?”

“Yes little bird,” he says slowly, his booted foot dropping heavily onto a lower step. She peers up at him, and something barely perceptible shifts in his face when he notices there are tears threatening to over flow in her eyes. “What? No, girl, the White House is the fucking most defensible building in the country, outside of the treasury building and the Pentagon.”

“No,” she says, wiping at the tears escaping from her lashes. Carefully, she has learned how to do so without making her eyes swell or to ruin her makeup; she uses the tips of her fingernails to collect the moisture so they do not leave behind a trace. “I’m relieved it isn’t an army from the north.”

Clegane snorts. “Do you know how long it would take your brother to move men down here?”

She tries to laugh. It is in awkward sound—disused, abandoned. “No. I don’t.”

“A really fucking long time.” He is silent for a moment, before the muscles on the unburned side of his face tighten and release suddenly. “No, little bird, you shouldn’t have to worry about the Lannisters tonight.”

“Worry about them killing me, anyway.” Her voice is barely audible. “Anything else is still fair game.”

He nods jerkily, unable to meet her eyes. He straightens again suddenly, a new bulletin coming through the earpiece. Lifting his right cuff to his mouth, her murmurs something that only reaches Sansa’s ears as a jumble of syllables, before jerking his head back towards her. “Get upstairs, girl.”

“What?” She slowly begins to reach for her shoes.

Clegane growls, dragging her upright, her shoes just out of reach of her fingers. He pushes her up the stairs. “Get upstairs. Get upstairs, and go to your pretty little cage. And block the door.”

Slowly climbing the steps backwards, Sansa feels the tension begin to ascend her spine again, the hairs on her neck and arms rising. “Why?”

Then she hears it: Joffrey’s angry yell, followed by his mother’s piercing shriek, from the floor below.

“Run,” he snaps. “Run, and block the door.”

 _Don’t fight him_ , he had told her. _Do as he tells you, girl. It’ll hurt less._ Sandor Clegane has never outright protected her, but he has never hurt her, either. And he treats her like a human being, not a captive. He must think the Lannisters’ rage to be truly formidable to advise her to go anything but the route of least resistance.

“Go,” he hisses, urging her on with his large hands on her shoulders. “If you can, get your dresser up against the door. Fucking White House, no locks on the doors. Clean your wounds, and take one of those sleeping pills you're trying to hide that the doctor gave you. When you wake it'll be over." 

Feeling the blood rush from her face, Sansa flees up the staircase and onto the second floor. Behind her, she can hear Sandor go back downstairs, and slam the door behind him.  
  


* * *

  
Sansa does not sleep that night.

She lies on top of the fine duvet covering the four-poster bed, as still as the night that weighs on her like a heavy cloak, listening to sirens and the sound of gunfire pollute the city soundscape. Eyes wide open, the shadows dance across the ceiling, the bright security lights from the White House lawn spilling into her bedroom through gauzy white curtains.

Her dresser is pushed in front of the door. And a heavy leather-backed chair, for good measure.

She does not flinch when Joffrey starts pounding on her door, nor when he continues for the better part of an hour. She does not flinch. She does not flinch.

She will not flinch. She will not move. She will not cry.

_You fucking slut, you’d better open this door if you know what’s good for you. Cunt, open the door. Cunt, if you don’t open this door I am going to wrap my hands around your throat and squeeze until you neck snaps._

_You fucking cunt, I’m going to do it anyway, how dare you deny me._

She is a pawn on the wrong side of the board.

And every piece is advancing.


	2. City of Ash

The cold wrought iron bench vibrates when he sits down next to her. Sansa had believed that she would be the only one crazy enough to sit outside in this weather, stinging drops of freezing rain falling in gasps from the darkened sky.  
  
He says nothing, but pulls a pack of cigarettes from his black wool coat’s pocket. He brings one to his scarred, dry, and chapped lips, his plain white Bic lighter following it soon after. Sansa watches him as he lights it with a practiced roll of his thumb, eyes widening briefly as the flame licks the end of the cigarette.  
  
She pulls her heavy blue parka tighter around her, watching rain freeze on the ends of his straight black hair.  
  
“Hello,” she says, refusing to move. She was here first. Besides, if she risks moving at all, the seat might get wet and the fact that her ass isn’t frozen is what’s keeping her from going back inside.  
  
He grunts at her in response, taking a drag off the cigarette like a dehydrated man takes to water.  
  
“That’s bad for you, you know,” she mumbles, watching the security lights on the White House lawn turn onto the higher frequency as night begins to truly fall.  
  
Sandor Clegane laughs, shaking his head at her, but not looking at her. “It’ll kill me,” he agrees, complacent enough.  
  
“So why do you do it?” Sansa inquires, mesmerized by how small it look in his large, calloused hands, the way he rhythmically brings it to his mouth, flicks hot ash off the tip and onto the moist ground.  
  
"Because something else is much more likely to kill me first." He looks at her then, like he regrets indulging her with an answer, raising an eyebrow. “Why do you care?”  
  
“I don’t.” It's not exactly a lie. Sansa doesn't know why she says it. Maybe because he's the only person here who, if she's mean to him, he'll only laugh.   
  
“I didn’t come out here to talk,” he rasps, looking away again, his eyes betraying a twinge of anger, and guilt, and something like sadness that Sansa does not expect.  
  
She snorts, surprising herself with the unladylike action. “There are other benches in the Rose Garden.”  
  
“Why are you out here? Everything’s dead and it’s raining.” He takes one more long drag and tamps out the cigarette against the bench, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. Dark grey eyes flickering to the sky, he corrects himself. “Sleeting.”  
  
Sansa can feel the muscles of her cheekbones tightening, imperceptible to the eye, but she has learned to read her emotions and what they do to her and how to control them. She wants to roll her eyes at him, but doesn’t have the luxury of making any more enemies. So she looks away to him, to the useless hands in her lap.  
  
“It’s better than being inside with him,” she mumbles. “And I know he won’t come outside.”  
  
He rumbles a laugh, low and bitter. “No, he won’t."  
  
She wants to ask  _why are you here? why do you serve the Lannisters if you don’t like them? why are you talking to me? why do you talk to me? why did you protect me? why did you push me upstairs? why did you seem so frantic? why did you wipe the blood from my lip?_  but she doesn’t. Answers complicate things more than questions. She’s learned that much.  
  
“I think he might treat me… gentler, tonight,” she says, and doesn’t quite know why. But Sandor Clegane is already intimately aware of what Joffrey does to her behind her bedroom door. And maybe she wants to see—  
  
 _Why are you gentle when you touch me? why did you tell me to clean my wounds? why do you call me little bird? why do they call you the hound? why do you work for these people? why didn’t you run away?_  
  
He clearly doesn’t know how to respond, so she keeps talking, the words flowing and rushing out like a river to the sea, words and words coming together in waves of disjointed, jagged sentences. “I mean, they’ve finally driven Baratheon’s men back into Virginia and are pushing them down, and now they’re in Maryland, so DC is no longer a warzone, I mean, sure it still is because there’s dead bodies everywhere and people are rioting at the capital but now I guess it’s safer but I don’t know. And since Canada invaded Vermont—I mean, can you fucking believe  _that_ —my brother’s no longer talking about the South and my mother’s returned home—”  
  
“You said  _fuck_ ,” he interrupts her, something resembling disbelief on his face.  
  
“Yes,” Sansa says, enunciating the word with a deliberate hiss, before continuing. “But anyway, now the first lady and Joffrey are happy, so I was thinking maybe he’d leave fewer bruisers.”  
  
What a strange world, she thinks. She now lives in a world where this is what she dares to hope for, when her father used to promise that she would marry someone kind, and brave, and gentle.  
  
“I just—you said the word  _fuck_ .” Clegane laughs, and extracts another cigarette from the pack.  
  
Sansa wrinkles her nose in distaste. “Why are you out here, anyway?”  
  
Holding the cigarette between his teeth, he answers. “Can’t smoke inside the White House, girl. You know that.”  
  
“I’m not a girl,” she mutters, a sudden jab of frustration flaring in her gut.  
  
“No…” he says, appraising her. Sansa instinctively wants to squirm in her seat, but holds herself tightly, muscles tensed beneath her loose-fitting clothes. Sandor Clegane’s eyes are not full of anger and lust, just a quiet sadness. “No, you’re not. Might be easier for you if you were just a girl.”  
  
He stops talking, then, and she doesn’t know how to fill the silence. Who is this man?  
  
“There are other benches.”  
  
“Do you want me to move?” He seems amused.  
  
Sansa sighs, fingers idly working at a napkin tucked into the pocket of her jacket. “Secretary Tyrell left the city last night. After Renly Baratheon was... assassinated.”  
  
“I know,” he answers, sounding irritated. “Still think he’ll treat you gentler, little bird?”  
  
“Don’t call me that,” she huffs. “I’m not a bird any more than you’re a dog.”  
  
“Not to the Lannisters,” he retorts, puffing on his cigarette. “Remember that.”  
  
She gulps, and then reaches out to lightly—and awkwardly, and Sansa Stark is not a woman who is easily made awkward—lay her hand on his arm. “You can call me Sansa, you know. It’s my name.”  
  
“Okay, Miss Stark,” he responds, smiling wryly, taking her hand off his arm and tossing it back into her own lap.  
  
She rolls her eyes. “You’re going to get lung cancer and I am going to  _laugh_ .”  
  
“Not very ladylike of you.” Clegane sounds vaguely annoyed and vaguely proud at the same time. “What would your mother say?”  
  
“My mother would say that I shouldn’t have to put up with you,” she replies, smirking.  _Oh god, what’s gotten into me? This man could kill me! Have I lost my mind?_  “Besides,” she continues, gesturing at herself, her smile turning wan and disquieted, “I’m not much of a lady anymore, am I, Agent Clegane?”  
  
“No badge, little bird.” Sansa watches his hands, his fingers as they curl around the cigarette, the asymmetrical line of his lips as they purse and relax around it. The way the smoke curls up through the rain, disappears into the night like secrets. He doesn’t sound annoyed with her, though, slate-colored eyes on her again, watching her watch him. “You know that already. Want one?”  
  
“Oh, no,” Sansa says, stuttering a bit. “I don’t smoke.”  
  
“You think you’re gonna live long enough to die from lung cancer?” he asks quietly, his voice like the feeling of his handkerchief wiping her lip, the push of his hands against her shoulders. “Do you really think your brother, the lawyer, is going to find a way to save you? Smoke a cigarette, little bird.”  
  
“Before I die,” she says, carefully, meeting his eyes. He taps one out of the pack and offers it to her. Hesitantly, she takes it. “I don’t think I know how. And I told you, it’s Sansa.”  
  
He barks a laugh. “You’re probably going to make an ass of yourself if it’s your first one.”  
  
“Well, thank the Lord you’re here.” The words spill off her tongue before she can think about them.  _Shit._  
  
But he laughs. “The little bird has a sense of humor. And some claws.”  
  
“ _Sansa_ ,” she whines. “My name is Sansa and okay, how do I do this?”  
  
“Well,” he starts, clearly enjoying himself. “You put it in your mouth—”  
  
“I’m honestly not as stupid as you make me out to be,” she rebuffs, leaning back against the back of the cold, wet wrought-iron and immediately regretting it. Gracefully, she straightens her spine, and without a pause in her speech, continues. “I was accepted to Dartmouth and Georgetown—and Columbia and William and Mary and UNC Chapel Hill—”  
  
“Shut up. I don’t care, girl,” he growls, holding out his lighter for her. “You people and your fancy fucking colleges and degrees. Not worth shit now, is it?”  
  
He flicks his thumb, scraping the wheel down on the lighter, a sputtering flame appearing on the top. She leans over it, lighting the end of the cigarette, watching him warily.  
  
“Inhale,” he instructs her as if she is a child. She probably is to him, she thinks. Young and dumb.  
  
The smoke hits her lungs, acrid and choking. Holding the cigarette away from her mouth, Sansa tries to tamp down the coughs rioting to get out of her chest while half-heartedly trying to glare at Sandor Clegane as he roared with laughter.  
  
“You—did that—on purpose!” She coughs, bringing the cigarette back to her lips, inhaling gently this time. It stings her throat, makes her chest clench, and then she feels something release inside of her. And then she starts coughing again. “Why do you do this?”  
  
He shrugs. “Never thought I was gonna live this long.”  
  
“How old  _are_  you, anyway?” she asks, no longer even berating herself for being impertinent.  
  
Clegane stares at her, before turning away to tap his cigarette over the edge of the arm rest. “Thirty-five.”  
  
“Joffrey said that you were Navy Seal.”  
  
“I came out here for a cigarette, not to be annoyed,” he snaps, but makes no effort to get up from the bench. The Rose Garden is grey, Sansa thinks. Not just because of the month. It is more than just the bare flower beds and wet, spongy ground that makes it seem empty, either.

Whatever courage she had fades, along with her smile. She lowers the cigarette from her lips with a stuttering motion, letting it rest over the end of her knee. Watching the ash cool and break off the end, she sits motionlessly, sinking back into the quiet, unresisting girl she is around everyone else. She does not need more people to resent her.  
  
He still doesn’t get up—Sansa turns her head almost imperceptibly to glance at him, following his line of sight out over the lawn and past the gate, where the security lights illuminate the streets, the crowds of everyday people milling about, waiting for an answer, waiting to leave, waiting for everything now that the fighting is over.  
  
Sansa sighs, and brings the cigarette back to her mouth, and manages not to cough this time.  
  
“I went to Annapolis.”  
  
She turns her head again, nodding, not that he’s looking at her. She could say,  _and you mock me for going to Georgetown?_  but doesn’t. She understands he didn’t have much choice in the manner. It had  
probably been arranged by Tywin Lannister and that it was his only way to get away from his brother. To get out. She understands that feeling now.  
  
“My father went to West Point.”  
  
The rain lessens, slightly. No longer a stinging, bone-consuming cold. Just there. Sansa finishes the cigarette, her first, and probably her last, and grinds it into the bench, smiling slightly at the stain the ash leaves behind on the white-painted iron.  
  
She has to go back inside soon.  
  
“What’s it like to die?”  
  
She isn’t quite sure where the words come from, but he’s probably the only person she can ask.  
  
“I’m not dead.”  
  
She sighs, uncomfortable, her parka almost soaked through and her ratty Dartmouth sweatshirt not providing much warmth. The cigarette has relaxed something inside of her, and she’s sure that if she cared enough to go searching for that particular shelf in her brain, she could find the box for what nicotine does to the body in freshman health.  
  
“You almost did, though. When your brother…” she trails off, and deliberately doesn’t look at him. She can envision the look of anger on his face without looking. “What does it feel like, dying?”  
  
He seems to understand the question, then. “It won’t be like that for you. They aren’t going to burn you. It’ll be quick. And clean.”  
  
“Like a hanging?” she whispers, resting her hands palms-up on her thighs. The rain drops fall there, and stay in her cupped hands.  
  
He rumbles a sigh, standing up. “I have to go back inside, girl.”  
  
“Will it hurt, what they do to me?” Her eyes flicker up at him. Sandor Clegane is an intimidating figure, more than six feet tall and a wall of muscle. The scars, and the dark eyes and the dark hair. His twisted features contort into a complex matrix of emotions that she doesn’t know well enough to untangle.  
  
“Don’t talk like that,” he growls.  
  
She shrinks. “Okay.”  
  
“Don’t.”  
  
“Okay!” she says, more forcefully, fingers tightening around the napkin in her pocket again. “Okay, I won’t!”  
  
She watches him storm back inside, fingers worrying the napkin into smaller and smaller pieces until her fingers and filled with small, sweaty strips.  
  
 _Come to the Rose Garden tonight, if you want to go home_ , is what had been written on it, before the ink had smeared in the palm of her hand. Sansa stands up, hand nervously rubbing her stomach, which was tender under her old soft hoodie. The angry purple bruise that Agent Trant had given her had almost faded to yellow.  
  
It had been her own fault. She still needed to get better at hiding her emotions from them, from showing the Lannisters the pain that she holds, from showing them her resentment and anger and guilt. She is better at it, now, making them believe that she loves them, that she is obedient and will not stray.  
  
She is afraid.  
  
Is it a trick—will meeting this person here be her end?  
  
At first she had thought it was Sandor Clegane, when he sat down next to her in the rain, and then he spoke nothing of it and neither did she. And now she worries more than if it is a trap, but if the person will  
be coming at all.  
  
Sansa knows she must save herself, but she will need help.  
  
This is helplessness. She has tasted it, and she does not like it. How could she have been allowed to turn out this way? To be this unable to save herself? Joffrey had spoken of how Agent Slynt had been locked up in jail and she had said that she hoped he stayed there.  
  
She cannot speak this way. She cannot. Not if she wants to live.  
  
(She isn’t so certain anymore.)  
  
 _Come to the Rose Garden tonight, if you want to go home_ . Or maybe it was some cruel trick of Joffrey’s like when he dragged her into the morgue to see her father’s autopsy. Or some subtle snare, a check of  
her loyalty. They think her broken. And quiet. But not defiant.  
  
(She’s not so certain she’s defiant either.)  
  
A member of the White House domestic staff strides past, but then pauses to look back at her.  
  
“What do you want?” Sansa demands.  
  
“Nothing, Miss. Just wondering if you needed anything,” the lady answers, limp brown hair pulled into a demure bun.  
  
“No,” Sansa says, pulling her coat tighter around her. “I’m fine.”  
  
“As you wish,” she replies. Sansa eyes the woman carefully. Was she one of Cersei’s spies? The woman scurries off. Doubtlessly to report back to the first lady, Sansa thinks. Had she seen the note on the  
napkin she found after breakfast? Was it planted by the first lady? The maids spy on her, of that much Sansa is certain.  
  
Sansa pulls the tattered remnants of the note and throws them to the wind, watches them get weighted down and scuttled by the cold rain, bleed upon the grass.  
  
She can hear the metro officers and various agents and military members milling about the perimeter, and the quiet breeding discontent of the people trapped in the city. She sings for them; she too, is among them.  
  
 _Help me, she prays. Send someone to me. Lord please send someone to help me get out of here._  As a child she favored her mother’s Catholicism, the stained glass windows and the incense, the fancy robes and pious, somber-faced chamber singers, the pomp and pageantry. But now she finds comfort in the White House chapel, the bleak, stark white-walled place. It reminds her of her father’s plain Methodist church.  _Please, Lord. Father almighty…_  
  
“I feared you wouldn’t come, Miss Stark,” a voice calls out to her.  
  
Sansa stands up, whirling around. A man steps out from the portico, heavy, thick-necked, and shambling. He wears a dark grey raincoat, the large hood pulled over his face. The shadows shifting across his features, she recognizes the blotchy skin and web of broken veins underneath. “Special Agent Hollard,” she breathes, heartbroken. When Sandor Clegane had first approached her in the Rose Garden, she had hoped so fiercely that it was him, but he said nothing. “It was you?”  
  
“Yes, miss,” he answers. When he moves closer, Sansa can smell beer on his breath. “Me.” He reaches out a hand.  
  
“Don’t!” Sansa exclaims as she shrinks back. She has nothing to protect herself with, but she can outrun him. “What do you want from me?”  
  
“Only to help you,” Hollard says. “Like you helped me.”  
  
“You’re drunk, aren’t you?” she asks, a look of disgust crossing her patrician features.  
  
“Only a beer, to give me some courage,” he replies. “If they catch me now I’ll be executed before sunrise.”  
  
 _And what will they do to me? Renly Baratheon is dead. My brother Robb does not have the support of the Northern Governors to march all the way here. Stannis is the only one left. What do the Lannisters need me for?_  
  
She balls her hands into fists. Her father had at least taught her how to land a punch. “Are you going to hit me?” Hollard slurs.  
  
“I will,” Sansa says through gritted teeth. “Tell me who sent you.”  
  
“No one, girl. Just an old tired Agent trying to do the right thing, not just follow orders for once.”  
  
“I prayed the Lord to send someone to save me,” she hisses. “Why would he send me a drunk like you?”  
  
 _But you didn’t question a drunk like Sandor Clegane, did you?_  her mind adds in, unbidden.  _But that's different._  
  
Hollard slumps. “I deserve that, I know. But all these years, serving the FBI and the Lannisters, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be good. I could be good, my girl. I could take you away from here. I know how to get out of the city.”  
  
“How,” Sansa asks, retreating when he advances. “How would you get me out of the city?”  
  
“Taking you out of the White House would be the hardest.” He appears to have given up on getting near her; Sansa relaxes the slightest bit at that. “But once we’re out I could drive you as north as you want. The northern roads are clear; its just going south and west that are the problems.”  
  
Sansa tilts her head slightly—he did not answer her as to how he would take her out of the city. And he doesn’t have the brute strength or intimidating presence of a man like Clegane. Could Hollard honestly best the men Lannister had spent years buying to get her home?  
  
Was there anyone else who would be willing to help her?  
  
 _No_ , she thinks.  _Clegane may treat you better than most, but he is still the Lannister’s dog._  
  
“Could we go now?” she asks wearily.  
  
“Tonight? No, Miss Stark.” His blood-shot eyes rake over her shivering frame. “We must wait until the hour is ripe. It won’t be easy, or quick. They watch me now too.”  
  
Of course.” Sansa purses her lips together, truly cold now. The rain soaks through her parka, and all she wants to do is go back inside. To be warm, and safe, and dry. But she won’t be, so she stands in the rain and listens to a drunk, the only man willing to try and get her away from all of this.  
  
“We’ll meet again.”  
  
“Will you send me another note?” Sansa asks, voice hedging on desperation.  
  
Hollard shakes his head. “Too risky. You’ll just have to come here as often as you can.”  
  
Sansa sighs. “I’ll try.”  
  
“Just… be patient. And strong.” Hollard looks around, eyes slanting over the grey surroundings. “And wait. Wait as long as you can. Patience.”  
  
“I will be,” Sansa promises. What is she getting herself into? “I’ll be patient.”  
  
This man is not her knight in shining armor, but he will have to do.  _Knights are erratic, and unpredictable._  He mimics a bow, and slinks back into the portico.  
  
Taking a deep breath, Sansa runs out of the rain and back into the storm.  
  


* * *

  
She hardly recognizes herself. Her face in wan, almost waifish. Her auburn hair is limp and lackluster, hanging in dark curtains around her haggard face. Soon all of her beauty will be gone, and Joffrey will be tired of her. He will have used her up. And he will toss her away.  
  
Is this what being a pawn is really like?  
  
Being a political daughter is something she knows well. She thought that that was her role as a pawn. Smile, look nice, chatter endlessly to the press. Stand by her father as he won re-election. Shake hands with the members of Maine’s state senate. Flirt with their sons. That was so easy.  
  
Life was so easy then, a pawn on the right side of the board. It was her duty. And she enjoyed it, she enjoyed the spotlight.  
  
Sansa thinks of all the times she chided Arya for complaining about it, tears welling in her blunted eyes. She’s happy that Arya has run. Arya wouldn’t have survived with the Lannisters, and if she had waited that night for Sansa to run with her, they never would have made it out of the city.  
  
 _I hope she’s safe_ , Sansa thinks. And then prays.  
  
She is cold now, all the time. This girl from Maine, she feels a deep chill that she has never known. Cold, and bruised. She lets her towel drop, standing nude in front of the full-body mirror. She can pick out the finger marks on her hips, waist, shoulders. Moving up and up. She wonders when Joffrey will take to squeezing her neck as he pumps into her. It’ll hurt, she thinks.  
  
Dispassionately surveying her body, she watches as gooseflesh crawls across her skin in waves. Her flesh is so blemished now. Who would find her pretty, now?  
  
At least Joffrey spares her face.  
  
She doesn’t even bother getting dressed, simply tears down the covers and slips beneath them, silently. So quietly, ignoring how her limbs quake, her hands tremble as she pulls the blankets to her chin.  
  


* * *

  
The next morning, she is brought in front of the Lannisters as they sit in the president’s dining room, eating their breakfast.  
  
The president informs her that her family’s house, in Winterfell, Maine, burned to ash during the night. That it is a sad  _accident_ . A true American  _tragedy_ .  
  
And that there are no survivors.  


* * *

  
Sansa feels something—  
  
Not snap. Not break. It is more of an absence of feeling, maybe, she doesn’t think, as her legs stop feeling like they are attached to her torso and she slides to the ground. But the ground doesn’t exist.  
  
She floats, maybe, her mind disjointed and foggy as it all closes in around her. Nothing exists. Her limbs tremble and shake and threaten to vibrate off of her body, her hands feeling like nothing, but her fingers look like the fine-boned wings of a fragile bird, poised to take off into flight—away, away from all of this.  
  
 _They’re dead._  
  
It’s almost funny. Almost.  
  
Sansa is trapped in this moment, which has no ceiling and no floor and no walls, just space and air that she is gasping to breathe. She is weighted down by nothing, she is a bird flying away. Flying and flying and then she will get tired and land and drown.  
  
Or get picked off by a bigger bird.  
  
She is a pawn, a little chirping bird. And they’ve only been waiting for her to get too close so that she could be picked off.  
  
The king is dead. The queen is dead—Bran, Ricky, Robb, Momma, Daddy. The game is over. The game is just begun. Why are they still playing with her? She did everything they had wanted; she wrote the letters, played their games—  
  
 _They’re dead. They’re all dead._  
  
She’s dead too. No one will fight her now. She’s dead.  
  
She can’t dig into herself to feel anything. Her hands claw uselessly at her blouse, short, grubby fingernails swiping at her pale skin, leaving livid red marks. She can scoop out her insides, red and bloody and slick and swinging and meaty and muscle and sinew and weak and so easy to tear and break and render—reach into the dark cave between her ribs, pluck out her heart. Give it to them. Give it all to them.  
  
She is dead.  
  
She is dead.  
  
Why isn’t she dead?  
  
 _You’ve done this. This is your fault._  
  
A laugh breaks from her, breaks her, and she vaguely feels herself being swept up off the floor, hysterical laughter bursting from her abandoned throat. Her diaphragm hurts, lazy and out of shape.  
  
She wants to claw out her heart and show it to them, balance it in her hands. It would be ash now, ash and cinder. But blood, too, maybe. Their blood. Stark blood. But blackened and charred from a fire too hot.  
  
She got too close—  
  
Too close.  
  
Too close.  
  
 _I was so stupid_ , she thinks, as someone large and warm carries her. Her eyes are wide shut, open and unseeing, something like screeches emptying from her lungs as she squirms in his grasp. Her body continues to move, her mouth opening futilely when the person lays her down on her bed, rolling her to the center, roughly pushes pillows around her head.  
  
 _Oh god Oh god Oh god Oh god_ —  
  
She’s laughing and crying and apparently losing it, Joffrey won’t want her like this, if she goes mad they can just say she killed herself—  
  
But it’s sweetness.  
  
She won’t know this way, won’t see it coming. Maybe it will be better.  
  
Sansa curls up on her side, tucking her knees up to her chin, holds them tightly against her hollowed-out chest. Yes, her heart. Her heart must be gone, dissolved, because she can feel nothing in her chest and can feel her heart pulsing in her fingertips and toes and in her head and ears—  
  
It must be gone, and the pain in her chest is dying.  
  
The someone’s finger’s dig into her hair—or maybe it’s her father’s, they are large and unpracticed, like her father’s, not her mother’s, try and brush through the morning-soft waves. She laughs, pressing her face into one of the pillows.  
  
The numbness rushes out like the tide. Sansa feels the world consume her again, a new wave, one that picks her up and tosses her down, down, down, until she is drowning in this new sadness—  
  


* * *

  
“The longer you keep him waiting, the worse it will be for you,” Clegane warns her, half-exasperated half-irritated.  
  
Sansa tries to bend her stiff, tired fingers fumbling at the buttons at the front of her pale pink dress. Joffrey’s bodyguard is always rough-tongued, she knows, but the way he looks at her now sets her on edge. Has Joffrey found out about her meetings with Agent Hollard—she has been careless, Sansa thinks. She has met him a half-dozen times since her family’s—  
  
Since the house burned down a week ago.  
  
 _Please no_ , she thinks frantically, tugging her brush through her hair.  _I have to look pretty. Joffrey wants me to look pretty. He won’t hurt me—he’ll hurt me less if I look pretty. He likes me in this color._  She smooths down the front of her dress, plaintively undoing one of the buttons, revealing a sliver of cleavage.  
  
“Please tell me what I’ve done,” she asks, steeling herself as he walks her out of the Residence.  
  
“Not you,” he rasps. “The northern governors are marching south again. With the middle states.”  
  
“They’re traitors.” Sansa knows the words by rote. “I have no part in what they do.”

Clegane snorts. “They trained you well, little bird.” He ushers her through into the West Wing, which is dark now, few lamps turned on, lit mostly by the bleak security lights filtering in through the panes of the bulletproof glass windows. He opens one of the glass-paneled doors into the Roosevelt Room, and roughly guides her through.  
  
Agent Hollard, now assigned to Joffrey’s detail permanently, to be mocked and belittled as the little prince saw fit, nodded at her and mouthes, “be brave.”  
  
Men move aside to allow her through to the center of the room. What was once space taken up by a long, gleaming conference table is now open, a single high-backed chair placed at the head of the rectangular room. Sansa tenses, can feel their eyes on her. Undersecretary Gyles laughs, the young aides ogling her openly. Mr. Redwyne averts his eyes, his brother pretending not to see her all together.  
  
A yellow cat lies on the once-pristine carpet, its innards splattered open by a single gunshot. Sansa steps around it, feeling ill.  
  
Joffrey stands in the center of the throng, before the chair, wielding a long, gleaming shotgun. Agents Blount and Trant are with him.  
  
“Joffrey,” Sansa says halting before him. “My love.”  
  
“That bullshit isn’t going to save you now,” he hisses.  
  
Sansa falls to her knees. “Please, my love, you know that I’ve had no contact with anyone, I would never betray you—I haven’t—“  
  
“Kneeling won’t save you, either,” he says. “Stand up. Answer to your family’s latest treasons.”  
  
“They’re dead, my love, you know that, there’s no way I could have,” she pleads, takes a deep breath to staunch her tears, and continues, “there’s no way I could have had a part, please, I beg of you—”  
  
“Get her up! Hound—”  
  
Clegane pulls her to her feet, not ungently.  
  
“Lance,” Joff says. “Tell her of this outrage.”  
  
Sansa has always thought Lance Lannister handsome and articulate, but she finds neither pity nor kindness in the way his eyes looked upon her. “Using some guerilla tactics, the northern governors marched on Maryland and burned cities and people behind them, women and children alike.”  _Fire_ , Sansa thinks.  _He speaks of me about women and children killed by fire_ . “Thousands of family were butchered as they slept, without a chance to defend themselves. After the slaughter, the northern national guardsmen desecrated the corpses, defiled the bodies of the women.”  
  
Horror coils its cold hands around Sansa’s throat, mirroring the feel of Joff’s hands there the night before.  
  
“You have nothing to say?” he asks, a sly, cruel smile winding its way up Joff’s face.  
  
“Sir,” Agent Dontos interrupts. “The poor girl is scared witless.”  
  
“Shut up, dumbass.” Joffrey cocks his shotgun, lifting the barrel level with Sansa’s face.  _Is he going to kill me?_  
  
 _Do I actually care?_  
  
Her father, the quintessential soldier, had taught her to be a fighter. She has always called herself a fighter, fought for her 4.0, fought for Dartmouth and Georgetown and the perfect prom dress and captain of field hockey team and, and—  
  
 _Am I going to fight to live?_  
  
“You fucking Starks are as wild as that backwoods dumbfuck state you call home.” He takes a step towards her. Sansa does not recoil, but begins to shake. “I’ll never forget how your stupid dog ravaged me.”  
  
“That was Arya’s dog,” she says.  _Not that it matters_ . “Lady never hurt you, but you killed her anyway.”  
  
“No, your father did,” Joff says, “but I killed your father. I wish I’d done it myself. I don’t know how my grandfather managed it. But good for him. I killed a man last night who was bigger than your father. He came to the gate and I shot him with this gun. They were calling for food and water, and I shot the loudest one straight through the throat.”  
  
“And he died?” With the barrel of a gun pointing between her eyes, Sansa finds it hard to locate anything else to say.  
  
Joffrey scoffs at her, turning his back to sit stiffly in his chair. “Blount, Trant.”  
  
The two Secret Service agents swoop in from the flanks, Agent Blount seizing Sansa by her arms.  
  
“Leave her face,” Joffrey commands, voice eager. “I like her pretty.”  
  
Blount slams a fist into Sansa’s stomach, driving the air out of her, the force of the blow reverberating through her limbs, ricocheting through her rib cage, ringing her head. Doubling over, Blount draws his gun and twists his hand into her long auburn hair, and for one terrifying moment she thinks he is going to click off the safety and blow out a knee cap or a shoulder or— _he’s going to blow my brains out oh God I don’t want to die I don’t want to die_ —but instead he brings it down against her temple, the crown of her head, again and again.  
  
Sansa screams.  
  
 _It’ll be over soon—I don’t want to die I don’t want to die_ —  
  
It’s not the same as wanting to live, but Sansa soon loses count of the blows.  
  
“Enough,” she can hear Sandor Clegane rasp.  
  
“No it isn’t,” Joffrey sneers. “Blount, strip her.”  
  
Blount shoves a meaty hand down the front of Sansa’s delicate shirt dress, and yanks the buttons apart, ripping the fine cloth-covered closures from the fabric. The cotton tears away with a frantic rip, baring her from the waist up. Sansa hands scrabble to cover her breasts, when Blount rips her bra from body. She can hear sniggers, near-by and cruel. Her eyes glass over with tears, focusing solely on the blurred design of the carpet.  
  
“Beat her bloody,” Joffrey sniggers. “We’ll see if those northern shits want her back then.”  
  
“What is the meaning of this?” The dwarf’s voice—Vice President Tyrion Lannister—cracks like a whip, and Sansa knows that it is over. She stumbles to her knees, hound pounding and spots dancing across her eyes, breathing torn and ragged. “Is this how you protect the first family and their guests, Agent Blount?” he demands angrily. One of his pet agents stands with him. “What sort of federal agent beats helpless girls?”  
  
 _I’m not helpless_ , Sansa wants to be able to say.  _I’m so helpless._  
  
“The sort who serves his president, Dwarf.” Blount raises his gun. Agent Trant stands up beside him, gun clearing its holster.  
  
“Careful with those,” Tyrion’s agent warns. “Don’t want to get blood over those fancy suits.”  
  
“Someone give the poor girl something to cover up with,” Tyrion says.  
  
Sandor Clegane unbuttons his suit jacket and tosses it to her, eyes not wavering from her face. Sansa cannot bear to look into his grey eyes, see the faint hint of something soft beneath the flint, beneath the steel and iron. Sansa pulls it around her, the heated silk sliding against her skin, fists tightly wound into the shell, clutching it closed over her chest. Somewhere through the pain and the tears, she can smell sweat and plain deodorant and maybe cologne and something that she’s come to associate with Clegane’s large, rough hands.  
  
“The girl’s going to be your wife.” Tyrion tells Joffrey. “Have you no decency?”  
  
“I’m punishing her.”  
  
“For what transgression?”  
  
“She’s a Stark.”  
  
“You fucking moron,” the older Lannister scowls.  
  
“You can’t talk to me that way,” Joffrey growls. “I can do as I want.”

“I’m the Vice President,” Tyrion counters. “I can do as I want. Bronn, Timmett, help me bring her to her room. The poor girl needs a doctor, too.”  
  
Sansa moves as if in a dream, fingers clenching on Clegane’s suit jacket. It drapes hugely on her frame, and in the first time a long time, she feels warm.  


* * *

  
Tyrion took her back to One Conservatory Circle for the first time in so many weeks. Months, now, she thinks.  
  
Several of the maids had ushered her into what was going to be her bedroom, a hundred years ago, stripped off her torn dress and bra, washed the blood from her hair, scrubbed her skin and poured warm water over her bruised skin.  
  
 _Federal agents are sworn to defend the weak, protect god and country and the innocent. But none of them did a thing. Only Agent Hollard tried to help, but he’s not much of an Agent anymore._  
 _  
__Sandor Clegane isn’t an agent either._ _  
  
_ _Sandor Clegane hates federal agents._ _  
  
_ _I hate them too._ _  
_  
There are no brave men, no protectors. No knights, waiting to swoop in and save her. No one saves the pawn. Not until she becomes a queen.  
  
When she is clean, and dry, Dr. Frenken comes to see her. He tells her that she has a concussion, stiches the rent of the thin skin covering her dainty skull. He bids her to lie face down on her mattress to rub a salve into the old welts on her back, from one of Joffrey’s other beatings, ones he conducted in private, in her bedroom.   
  
He hands her a pill.  
  
“Sleep a bit, child. When you wake, it’ll feel better.”  
  
 _No it won’t you stupid idiot_ , Sansa thinks, but swallows the pill anyway, and sleeps. When she awakes, the sunlight streaming through the dainty curtains, Tyrion Lannisters is perched on the edge of her bed. She winces, shielding her eyes. He stands up and crosses the room to pull closed the blinds.  
  
He looks at her silently, but not expectantly.  
  
“Am I your prisoner?” she rasps.  
  
“My guest.” He shoves his hands into the pockets of his trousers. “I thought we might talk.”  
  
“As you wish,” Sansa answers obediently. She finds it hard not to stare as his pinched, grotesque face. It is unlike Clegane’s, she thinks. She has no problem anymore looking at Sandor Clegane. Not anymore.  
  
Sansa pulls the blankets up to her chest, sitting up gingerly. That morning, when her family was—  
  
Her family is dead.  
  
She must repeat it to herself, often, to make it true and real. Even now, none of this seems real. It is such a horror that it cannot be real.  
  
“I had some of your clothes brought over. I hope you will find them satisfactory.”  
  
“You are most kind,” Sansa mumbles. That morning, she thinks Sandor Clegane had carried her back to her bed, rubbed her back, stroked her hair. She cannot remember a face or a person, just his hands. She knows his hands. “Thank you for helping me last night.”  
  
“I am sorry that my nephew is what he is.” Sansa cannot discern the emotions broiling under the dwarf’s face.  
  
“I love him with all my heart,” she responds immediately. That morning, Sandor Clegane had held her, she thinks. And before the world slipped away entirely, pressed his lips to hers. And before, in the Rose Garden. He made her human again. He called her a woman.  
  
A woman, not a girl.  
  
Only a woman can be a queen. And knights. He had seen battle, Sandor Clegane. He had seen battle and had been scarred and his marks were proof that he had warred with life and had come out the victor. She will have scars too. On her back and her front and now her head—but she too—  
  
She could fight. Maybe.  
  
“Truly?” Lannister asks, sounding unconvinced. “Even now?”  
  
Sansa falters, not for long, but she does falter.  
  
“I will have a deadlock installed on your door in the Residence,” the Vice President tells her. “Joffrey will not be able to harm you like… like he has been, again. But you may stay here, if you wish.”  
  
“Th-thank you,” Sansa stammers, fingers clutching the blankets like she clutched Clegane’s jacket the night before. “But I would rather return to my own bed. This house is where—I would see my father’s blood, wherever I looked.”  
  
Tyrion Lannister studies her face. “I am no stranger to nightmares, Miss Stark. I understand. Please allow me to escort you back to White House.”  
  
Back into the lion’s den.  
  
But Sansa would be ready this time.  
  
She is a pawn on the wrong side of the board, but she is closing in on the end.


	3. City of Blood

In order to become a Queen, a pawn must distract the other side for long enough to cross the board unnoticed. Or rather, move when a distraction is provided.

The night sky fills with fire, and Sansa knows that her moment has come. No one will look at her tonight.   
  


* * *

  
Hours earlier, she is sitting on her bench in the Rose Garden, the one that she has not shared with Sandor Clegane for over a week. She has not shared anything with Sandor Clegane this week. Not a glance, not a word. Not even silence.

(She still has his suit jacket. He has not asked for it back. She is not sure if she would give it, if he did.)

(Why, she doesn’t know. Nor does she really have the energy to search inside herself to figure out why.)

 _Not yet_ , Agent Hollard had told her.  _Not yet, we will know the moment when it comes._

 _When?_  she had asked. And he had smiled politely and answered her vaguely, yet again, and excused himself to his duties. Sansa knows that she is putting her faith in the wrong person, but the drunk, incapable Hollard is the only one who seems to be willing to offer help. And Sansa knows that the White House is so well-guarded these days that she will not be able to make her escape without help from someone on the inside.

She misses the snow. It must be snowing back in Maine. Her breath coils tightly in her lungs when it hits her, again and again like bullets being fired repeatedly from a gun, that her home is gone. She has nothing to go back to—

But her memories sit in her mind like a snow-globe. Perfect and pristine, her childhood home is both true and intangible, false and alive inside this world in miniature. She inverts the memory in her mind, until it curves in the shape of a lie, and snow falls softly over the home of childhood, protected and unreachable. All that Sansa has ever known is gone.

It doesn’t snow here.

And to think, she used to complain about the cold.

 _Give me a kiss_ , he had told her, leaning in. Sansa had closed her eyes and lightly pressed her lips to his fleshy, stubbled cheek, avidly avoiding his wet, searching lips. She did not have to take that, not anymore, not after Tyrion Lannister put the lock on the door and agents in the hallway, barring Joffrey and the rest entrance. A burst of frustration ripples under her skin, pushing Sansa to her feet. Blood swirls through her brain, her vision quickly closing to pin points, some unstoppable force pulling her back down onto the bench. Some large hand shoots out of the darkness, steadying her and preventing her from sliding down off the slick bench and onto the muddied ground.

“Let go of me,” she cries, batting away the hand as the miasma clouding her vision begins to dissipate, the heaviness in her head subside. “Let go!”

“The little bird was falling,” a male voice—which she immediately recognizes—chastises her, pulling her torso up into a straight line, picking her up off the bench for a slim second before dropping her back onto it. Sansa slumps against the back, closing her eyes. “Unless you wanted to hit your head against iron.”

“I wasn’t going to fall, I was—”

“Come off it, girl,” he rasps, looming over her.

She takes a deep breath, forcing away the spots in her vision. “You startled me, that’s all.” Looking up suddenly becomes painful, a sharp pain pulling behind her eyes. “I thought I was alone.” She looks down.

“The little bird still can’t bear to look, can she?” She hears him move, and then the bench shifts slightly beneath her, and she can feel his warmth beside her. She can’t read him well enough to tell if he’s angry or disappointed in her. She braces herself for his rage—which she remembers. She knows his rage, just as well as she knows Joffrey’s. She watched him shoot the arm off of the man at the gate. She has borne the brunt of it as well, in her early days in DC before she learned how not to provoke Joffrey’s ill-tempered bodyguard.

“I should have thanked you,” she says, haltingly, instead of  _that is unfair, I was a child then_. “When you told them to stop. And the night you told me to bar the door. Thank you, that was very brave.”

Her voice is dulled. She does not need this from him; she should not accept it from anyone. But she is not in a position to fight back. He could harm her, she thinks. But he would not. But courtesy is her armor. She will arm herself with false platitudes and a flat voice. He cannot hurt her. No one can hurt her.

“Brave?” He gives her a harsh laugh. “Don’t thank a dog for chasing off rats, girl.”

_I’m not a girl. And you are not a dog._

“Still, thank you for giving me your jacket.” She does not tell him she will never forgive him for not helping her. For going along with the Lannisters’ whims. The country is at war—there are sides that would gladly give him shelter at her word. “I must return it to you, sir.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see him glaring at her, and angry smile twisting his lips. “Doesn’t mean a fucking thing. You keep it.”

She smiles then, a small and ugly thing. Sansa hates the way he speaks, always so angry and hateful when he is not being Joffrey’s dutiful guard. “Does it give you joy to be an ass to everyone?”

“Yes, little bird.” He takes too much happiness from being cruel to others, she muses, watching him. She watches him, just like how she watches all of them.

“Please do not call me that,” she says. Her voice is calm. She is calm. She is a lady, and she deserves to be respected. She is Sansa Stark, and she deserves kindness. She is a human being. “I am your employer’s fiancé. You will address me as either _miss_ or _Miss Stark._ ”

Clegane says nothing in return, and Sansa moves to stand before invoking his anger.

“Do you think I’m here to save you?” he asks, voice turning harsh. Angry. She has provoked him, she knows. It does not surprise her. The world’s cruelties no longer hold any surprise for her. “That I’m some American hero like your daddy? That I’m some honorable soldier, looking out for the weak and the poor? You think your daddy was like that too—he was a soldier, girl. Soldiers kill. We’re not in it for honor or patriotism or the rest of that bullshit.”

“It was his duty,” she seethes, fingernails biting into the raw skin of her palms. The blood begins to pound in her head again and she turns to look at him, not letting her eyes drop from his face. His eyes glitter strangely in the damp light, almost excited beyond his usual mask of disgusted apathy. “He didn’t enjoy what he did. But he fought for God and country.”

“Is that what he told you?” he laughs. It is tinged with cruelty. She wants to leave, knows she can leave, but chooses to stay. “Your father lied. Killing is the sweetest thing there is.” He draws his gun from its holster, turning it dispassionately in his hands. His eyes reveal nothing, she sees.  _He feels nothing. Perhaps only anger, and hatred. And perhaps only that because he does not know how to feel anything._

Sansa remembers the military gala Joffrey took her to in her first month in the capital, where Sandor ran into his brother. She watched Captain Gregor Clegane with his poor, shaking, silent wife. She heard the story from Sandor’s drunken lips. Of how Gregor pushed his face into the fireplace in the dead of winter, of the father who covered it up, of the Lannisters who bought and paid for Gregor’s career and power and then Sandor’s.

 _They call him dog_ , she thinks.  _He does not remember how to be a man._

Sansa feels her anger dissipate. She hugs herself, cold again. “Why are you always so hateful? I was thanking you…”

_There are other gardens. You do not have to take your break here._

"Just as if I was one of those good old American boys you love so well, yes. What do you think a soldier is for, girl? You think it's all taking kisses from ladies and looking fine in uniform? Soldiers, agents, the police are for killing." He doesn’t move his body, but raises his arm high enough that the barrel of his gun is level with her forehead. Sansa can feel the coldness of the steel, even from half a foot away.

"I killed my first man at eighteen. I've lost count of how many I've killed since then. Men in their homes, civilians and soldiers, you can’t tell over there—women and children too—they're all meat, and I'm the butcher. Let them have their land and their gods and their gold. Let them have their officers and ribbons and medals." Sandor Clegane spits at her feet to show what he thinks of that. "So long as I have this," he said, dropping the gun  from her head, "there's no man on earth I need fear."

 _Except your brother_ , Sansa thinks, but has better sense than to say it aloud.  _He is a dog, just as he says. A half-wild, mean-tempered dog that bites any hand that tries to pet him, and yet will savage any man who tries to hurt his masters._  "Not even the men across the river?"

Clegane's eyes turn toward the distant fires. "All this burning." He holsters his gun. "Only cowards fight with fire."

"Stannis Baratheon is no coward—”

“He's not the man his brother was either. President Baratheon never let a little thing like a river stop him."

"What will you do when he crosses?"

"Fight. Kill. Die, maybe."

"Aren't you afraid? That God might send you down to some terrible hell for all the evil you've done."

"What evil?" He laughs "What God?"

"The Lord who made us all."

"All?" he mocks. "Tell me, little bird, what kind of god makes humans suffer like the Dwarf, or a halfwit like Secretary Stokeworth's daughter? If there are gods, they made sheep so wolves could eat mutton, and they made the weak for the strong to play with."

"Soldiers protect the weak."

He snorts. "There are no glorious soldiers, no brave policemen, no more than there is a God. If you can't protect yourself, die and get out of the way of those who can. Good guns and strong arms rule this world, don't ever believe any different."

Sansa backs away from him, feeling something like despair tightening in her gut. This was the man who pushed her up the steps to hide from Joffrey, who told them to stop, who covered her up and carried her to bed and kissed her.  _He is man, and he is hurting_ , she tells herself fiercely.  _He is like me. We do not handle it the same way, but we are both hurting. We are more alike than we are different._  "You're awful."

"I'm honest. It's the world that's awful. Now fly away, little bird, I'm sick of you chirping at me." He smiles at her, a bemused and ugly thing.

Sansa steels herself, and leaves, unwilling to remain in his company after his abject dismissal, but similarly unwilling to return to the Residence, Cersei’s domain. She figures she will circle the grounds until she must go inside for dinner. Wrapping her arms tighter around herself, she sets off on her walk.

 _There is a God. There are brave soldiers. There are good men_ . Whether or not Sandor Clegane is one, however, she thinks, remains to be seen.  _Not all the stories are lies._  
  


* * *

“Miss Stark.” Secretary Peter Baelish sweeps out from the alcove opening out onto the south lawns, offering Sansa his arm. “My condolences, sweetheart. Your mother was a close friend from my childhood. I cannot imagine the magnitude of your loss.”

Sansa reluctantly takes his arm, careful to keep a layer of cool air between their bodies.

Peter Baelish is no hero—he is the Secretary of the Treasury.  _He controls the purse strings, and the Secret Service. And the Secret Service’s purse strings_.  _I must not trust him. I must not trust anyone_.

(She errantly brushes away the thought of Sandor Clegane that steals through her mind.)

Nevertheless, she allows Secretary Baelish lead her around the lawn, nodding at his idle chatter, watching the people they pass, carefully picking out which agents Baelish had bought and filing away the information for future use.

After all, war will come to their doorsteps at any moment. She must prepare herself in every way possible.  
  


* * *

  
They have been singing in the East Room all since dusk, since the first report of enemy fire had reached the White House. The sound of their voices mingled with the squeal of tires, the sharp report of gunfire, and the groaning hinges of the great iron gates to make a strange and fearful music. In the rows of seats they sing for Mother Mary’s mercy but their knees it's the Father they pray to, and all in silence. She remembers how Sister Mary Mordane used to tell them that the father and the Holy Spirit were only two faces of the same great god, and that the saints could do the Lord’s work and help answer prayers. All were faces and facets of the same great God.

_But if there is only one God, whose prayers will be heard?_

Agent Trant holds the door to the sleek, black armored car open for Joffrey to enter. Sansa thinks he has never looked more like a boy, clad in an uniform he is not fit to wear. Like a little boy dressing up for Halloween, she thinks. The uniform is fit for men like her father and Robert Baratheon and the Hound. Not for Joffrey.

The pale sunlight glints off the golds and reds and vibrant blues and clean whites decorating his ROTC cadet uniform every time he moves. Bright, shining, and empty, Sansa thinks, recalling every story behind every one of her father’s medals and ribbons.

His uncle, Tyrion, is waiting beside him in the White House drive, dressed more plainly than the little prince in battle gear that made him look like a little boy dressed up in his father's clothes. But there was nothing childish about the glock that the Dwarf of Dallas had strapped to his thigh. Agent Moore prepares to ride at his side, police motorcycle dinged and stained with soot and blood.

When Tyrion sees her he stops checking his weapon, and turns to her.

"Miss Sansa," he calls to her. "Surely my sister has asked you to join the other civilians in the Residence?”

"She has, sir, but my love Joffrey sent for me to see him off. I mean to visit with the White House chaplain as well, to pray."

"I won't ask for whom." His mouth twists oddly; a mockery of a smile. Sansa shapes her mouth similarly, biting back her ire. Why must he bait her so, in front of Joffrey? There will be a time when his ability to protect her is gone. Is he so arrogant to assume that he can “protect” her at every turn?

She watches the rest of the men climb into the car, and the agents mount their motorcycles. She waves until they are beyond the gates and are out of sight.

Through the quiet, the singing pulls at her. Sansa turned toward the doors to the ground floor of the Residence, to the foyer that leads to the East Room. Two grounds workers follow, and one of the agents whose watch was ended. Others fall in behind them.  
  


* * *

Sansa has never seen the floor so crowded, nor so brightly lit, not even for Joffrey’s birthday gala; great shafts of light—the security lights, yes, she knows—cast through the windows, twinkling specs of lint dancing inside of them. The altar to Mary and the saints and the candles of the lost are swamped with people—people standing, people on their knees, people on top of people and all the candles alight, voices and eyes raising to God.

 _There are so many people_ , she thinks.  _So many, fighting so many against many against many_.  _Who will be left to judge us but God?_

She thinks of the last CNN broadcast into the city before the cables were brought down the night before. They paint her as the traitor to her family, now that Robb is no longer alive to speak for her. They do not understand why she cannot leave. Why she does not confront them. Why she simply folds into herself and  _waits._

She no longer exists within these walls. Nor out of them. Nothing remains of her except her bones. She is Sansa Stark, and she has nothing else. But she wants to live. So that is what she will fight for.

Sansa visits each of the altars in turn, lighting a candle at each altar. She then goes before the chaplain and kneels, receiving communion, the wine heavy on her lips and the wafer bitter on her tongue, and then finds herself a place in the rows of folding chairs between a wizened old cleaning woman and a boy no older than Ricky, dressed in the fine oxford shirt and navy vest of Sidwell Friends School. The old woman's hand is bony and hard with callus, the boy's small and soft, but it is good to have someone to hold on to. The air is hot and heavy, smelling of incense and sweat and unwashed bodies—the water turned off this morning, another omen that Sansa knows, that the end of the Lannisters’ reign is coming—it makes her dizzy to breathe it.

he knows the hymn; her mother had taught it to her, a long time ago in Winterfell. She joins her voice with theirs.

_Áve María, grátia pléna, Dóminus técum. Benedícta tu in muliéribus, et benedíctus frúctus véntris túi, Iésus._

rom across the city, thousands had jammed into the National Cathedral and other churches for asylum, and they would be singing too, their voices swelling out over the city, across the river, and up into the sky.  _Surely God must hear us. He will know we have no part in this war. We want peace. We want it to end._

But God doesn’t always protect the innocent.

Mother, Father, Robb, Bran, Ricky— _the dead_. Jon, Arya— _the missing._

_Sáncta María, Máter Déi, óra pro nóbis peccatóribus, nunc et in hóra mórtis nóstrae. Ámen._

Sansa knows most of the hymns, and followed along on those she did not know as best she could. She sings along with grizzled old garbage men and anxious young wives, with waitresses and assistants, cooks and interns, bus drivers and the cleaning staff, students and valets and nursing mothers. She sings with those inside the high fence around the White House yard and those without, sings with all the city. She sings for mercy, for the living and the dead alike, for Bran and Ricky and Robb, for her sister Arya and Jon, away, missing but maybe still safe somewhere, hiding and alone. She sings for her mother and her father, for her grandfather Hoster and her uncle Edmund Tully, for her friend from Georgetown Jeyne Poole, for old drunken President Robert Baratheon, for Sister Mary Mordane and Agent Hollard and Jory Cassel, father’s aide, and Luwin, her father’s old Chief of Staff. For all the brave soldiers and policemen and women who will die today, and for the children and the wives who will mourn them, and finally, toward the end, she even sang for Tyrion the Dwarf and for the Hound.

 _He is no hero but he saved me all the same_ , she prays to the Lord, fingers clasped tightly and eyes squeezed shut.  _Save him if you can, and gentle the rage inside him. Heal his hurts. Lead him onto the path to righteousness. In Jesus’s name I pray, amen._

But when the priest climbs on the steps brought in leading up to the altar and calls upon the gods to protect and defend their president, Tywin Lannister and his family, Sansa gets to her feet.  _Let his guns break and his tanks break and his ranks break_ , Sansa thinks coldly as she shoves out through the doors,  _let his courage fail him and every man desert him._

A few agents pace along the doors, but otherwise the White House seems empty outside of the East Room. Sansa stops and listens. Away off, she can hear the sounds of battle. The singing almost drowns them out, but the sounds are there if you have ears to hear: the moaning sirens, the cacophony of gunfire, the shouts of officers and the flashbangs of bombs and the rumble of breaking pavement, the clatter of falling houses and blasted brick—and below it all, the sound of death.

 _Why?_ Sansa thinks.  _Why? Why would you kill for power and kill to keep it. It is not yours, Tywin Lannister. This country is not yours. Neither are its people._

_This country is not yours, Stannis. Not yours. Not anyones._

_If I was ever president, I would make them love me._

She stands in the foyer, breathing. Just breathing. It comes to her one second at a time, now. It is all she can live for.

Perhaps if she finds a way out she can surrender to Stannis’s men. Maybe they will not kill her on sight. She must find Agent Hollard, she knows. This is the moment. But his face has been absent from the crowds, and she worries that he has been sent to fight and die. One thing she knows for certain is that if she escapes and fails, the Lannisters will not hesitate to kill her. With Robb dead and the northern states left with no one to rally around, she no longer has any value to them. Surely Stannis Baratheon has no interest in her.

(Sometimes she wonders why she is still alive.)

The two guards at the door wear the uniform of the Secret Service but Sansa knows they are only guns for hire dressed up in suits. Another sits at the foot of the stair—a real agent would be standing, not sitting on a step with his rifle across his knees, but he rises when he sees her.

Sansa freezes, the sight of Agent Payne, the man who was at her father’s cell the night of his death stands against one of the large windows overlooking the portico.

The hidden door to the staircase opens, and the First Lady steps through it.

Cersei's suit is made of snowy linen. Her tailored sleeves show a lining of gold satin. Masses of bright yellow hair tumble to her shoulders in thick curls. Around her slender neck hangs a strand of pearls. All the white makes her look strangely innocent, almost maidenly, but there are points of color high on her cheeks, betraying her agitation.

She pauses, looking at the auburn-haired girl. "You look pale, Sansa," Cersei observes. "Still not well?"

“Yes."

"How apt." The first lady appraises her with cold eyes. They are hungry, but detached. Like a predator observing its prey when the game has grown boring, when victory is assured and all that is left is the kill.

"Why is Agent Payne here?" Sansa blurts out.

The first lady glances at the mute agent. "To deal with treason, and to defend us if need be. He was a corrections officer before he was in the secret service." She points her index finger toward the end of the hall, where the tall wooden doors had been closed and barred. "When the axes smash down those doors, you may be glad of him."

 _I would be gladder if it were the Hound_ , Sansa thinks. Harsh as he was, she does not believe Sandor Clegane would let any harm come to her. "Won't your guards protect us?"

 _No, of course not,_  she thinks bitterly before Cersei can even answer.

"And who will protect us from my guards?" The queen gives the hired guns a sideways look. "Loyal bodyguards are rare as virgin whores. If the battle is lost my guards will trip over themselves to switch sides. They'll steal what they can and flee, along with the servers, cleaning women, and valet boys, all out to save their own worthless hides. Do you have any notion what happens when a city is sacked, Sansa? No, you wouldn't, would you? All you know of life you learned from fairytales, and there's such a dearth of good sacking stories."

"Real men would never harm women and children." The words ring hollow in her ears even as she says them.

"Real men." The first lady seems to find that wonderfully amusing. "No doubt you're right. So why don't you just go pray with the others like a good girl, and wait for a white knight to come and save you. I’d recommend you get yourself a knife. Make sure it’s sharp. It’ll be better to slit your own throat than to live through what they’ll do to a pretty young thing like you. Die on your own terms.”  
  


* * *

_  
They have passed the gates._

_They have torn down the gates. The White House is without power and Stannis Baratheon’s men have torn down the gates. I must get out I must leave now._

_Oh God._

_Oh God oh God oh God, Lord please have mercy._

_Where is Hollard. He is gone. He’s left me. I shouldn’t have trusted him oh God he’s gone and left me—_

She screams.

Agent Hollard is still in the White House. Sansa screams, throwing herself backwards, throwing herself off balance and hits the floor with the loud sound, muffled only a bit by the plush carpet.

“Oh  _God_ ,” she screams, crab-crawling back, away from Agent Hollard’s body, which is stuffed into the curtains. He is bloodlessly pale in the moonlight, and Sansa scrambles to her feet, edging to the other side of the hallway before breaking out into a run to the staircase, sprinting up to the second floor.

_No one there is no one no one I will save myself._   
  


* * *

  
She slams her door shut behind her, whirling around to get to the far side of her dresser to barricade it shut. Adrenaline pumps through her veins, cold sweet sticky against her clothes, pulling at the thin cotton of her blouse and the satin lining of her grey skirt. Cold. She is hot and cold and her head is spinning and she is going to pass out and  _soon_.

She had tried to calm them downstairs, she had. After Cersei had fled and Lance had come in, bleeding she had tried but there was no hope. Only a sort of restless hysteria, which had given way to chaos when the lights went out and the generators were cut.

“Miss Stark.”

She screams, clapping her hand over her mouth.

He steps out of the shadows, reaching a hand out to her. “Calm down, Sansa. It’s going to be okay, I have a way out. I can take you with me, to your Aunt Lysa.”

“Secretary—Secretary Baelish,” she breathes, but does not reach for him. Instead, she backs away. He is the reason that Cersei will not allow the Secret Service near her or her son. She cannot trust this man. She can trust no one. Not anymore. “Wh—what are you doing here?”

“Agent Hollard is dead, Miss Stark.”

“O—okay,” she answers, her back hitting the edge of her dresser. He advances towards her, and Sansa’s eyes fill with light, even in the pervading darkness. She has never noticed how  _dark_ the night can get. The fighting must have knocked out the city’s power. “I know that. I—I saw him.” She finds her voice and steadies it. “Why does it matter?”

“He was helping me, sweetheart. He was going to help me take you out of the city.”

Sansa feels a shiver ring through her, feels the adrenaline ring through her, feels her pulse pumping in her ears. She rings like a bell. Her fingers itch to move, so do her feet.  _Do not stop moving_ , a voice whispers in her ear. She does not, easing her weight back and forth between her feet.

“You?” she asks. “Agent Hollard was your man?”

“Yes, dear,” Baelish answers.  _I come from a small stretch on the peninsula called the fingers. Very small. It’s really a clever nickname_. Sansa wonders why she had trusted so many people. “We have to leave _now,_ though.”

“Okay,” Sansa says, holding the syllables in her mouth like she is afraid to let them go. “And you will take me to my aunt?” she asks tentatively.

“Yes,” Littlefinger replies, smiling. “I will take you to Lysa.”

“Why?”

His smile grows wider, and he reaches out for her again. “Your mother was such a good friend of mine.”

She does not reach out to him, her body crying for her to run. Take flight, it says. Take flight.

And something in the room breaks, and Peter Baelish, for as slight of a man as he is, lunges for her. Sansa does not scream, she does not have time to. She launches herself off the dresses towards the door to her bathroom, something in her blood giving her grace and speed. She crashes onto the tiled floor, feet slipping out from under her as she turns, slowly, she thinks she is moving slowly—everything is moving slowly, and she tries to slam the door shut, she does—

But Littlefinger’s foot is there and the door bounces back open and his hands are reaching for her and she shrieks, batting them away.

“Let me help you!” he shouts, hands closing in around her waist. “I’ll help you!”

 _No he won’t_ , her blood sings. She screams, bites at his hand when it covers her mouth, screams again when his arms wrap around her waist. He drags her back out into her bedroom, and she screams and kicks and fights, holding onto her door and she feels her nails breaking as she holds on and he tears her away from it, throws her down onto the bed.

“Let me help you,” he says.

 _Not again_ , Sansa thinks. She whines, pushing back at him, hands flailing as he tries to grab her wrists and pin her down.  _No, not again._

Baelish takes her wrists and wrenches them above her head, and Sansa hisses as she feels her shoulder pop out of place, her arm twisting at an unnatural angle. Her back arches up off the bed as her mouth opens, and snaps, trying to grab the skin of his neck between her teeth. He just smiles down at her, calm.

“No,” she says. “ _No_ , get off of me. Go. No. No, please. Please, just go.”

 _Fight_ , a voice tells her.  _Fight, darling, you have to fight._

“Please. Please no. Please just stop. Please, please sir, please.”

She kicks her legs uselessly, bucking up against him. A crash sounds from below, and he is distracted. Sansa brings her head up, battering it against his nose. Baelish curses, and for a moment his control is shakened, and Sansa takes it.

Rolling out from under him, she reaches for her nightstand, and grabs her metal nail file.

And plunges it into his neck.

Littlefinger collapses on top of her, curdling gasps coming from his throat, blood bursting from his throat.

 _I did not miss_ , she thinks.  _I saved myself._

She rolls his body off of her, and sits up, staring at Littlefinger—Littlefinger’s body—in shock. She rubs at the blood on her hands, numb.

“Fuck.”

_I killed a man._

Her door bursts open, the one corner of the dresser that she had managed to push in front of it is sent flying. Sansa does not scream, but slumps down tiredly, her shoulder protesting loudly.

“Little bird,” Sandor Clegane says, crossing the room to her in three long steps, covered in blood and gore. He kneels before her. “Didn’t anyone tell you to keep your hands clean.”

 _He can help me_ , she thinks.  _I prayed for him to come_.

She lets her eyes focus, and looks down at him, and her hopes fall. His eyes are glassy, bloodshot. His breath reeks of alcohol.

_He is drunk._

"If you scream I'll kill you. Believe that. I’m not like Littlefinger. You won’t be able to fight me off. That was good of you, though, little bird. I always knew you were strong." He takes her hands in his, examines them. Her breath comes raggedly, the adrenaline rapidly leaving her system. Clegane takes a flask from his pocket, and raises it to her lips. She drinks. "Don't you want to ask who's winning the battle, little bird?"

"Who?" she says, too tired and too frightened to deny him.

The Hound laughs. "I only know who's lost. Me."

 _He is drunker than I've ever seen him._  "What have you lost?"

"All." The burnt half of his face is a mask of dried blood. "Bloody dwarf. Should have killed him. Years ago."

"He's dead, they say."

"Dead? No. Fuck that. I don't want him dead." He casts the empty flask aside. "I want him burned. If God is good, they'll burn him, but I won't be here to see. I'm going."

"Going?" She tries to wriggle free, but his grasp is iron.

"The little bird repeats whatever she hears. Going, yes."

"Where will you go?"

"Away from here. Away from the fires. Up through Maryland. The bridges have burned by nows, I suppose. North somewhere, anywhere. Out of this fucking city. This fucking city ain’t no good for us, little bird." Sansa can hear a faint Texan drawl breaking through his speech. 

"You won't get out," Sansa says, wrapping her fingers around his. He won’t let go of her hands, but he allows her to do as much. "The queen's closed up the block, and Stannis’s men are at the doors. We can’t leave.”

"I can leave. I have this." He pats the butt of his gun. "The man who tries to stop me is a dead man. Unless he's on fire." He laughs bitterly. "Stannis's men would kill us all. They're burning this building to the ground. The White House, huh? But Stannis would take you. He's too fucking self-righteous to let a pretty girl like you get killed. Besides, it would make him look bad."

"Why did you come here?" She rubs his calloused hands with the soft pads of her fingers, trying to calm him. She needs him to be calm. He cannot be sober, but she needs him to be calm.

"Everything scares you. Look at me. Look at me."

The blood masks the worst of his scars, but his eyes were white and wide and terrifying. The burnt corner of his mouth twitches and twitches again. Sansa can smell him; a stink of sweat and sour wine and stale vomit, and over it all the reek of blood, blood, blood.

"I could keep you safe," he rasps. "They're all afraid of me. No one would hurt you again, or I'd kill them." He yanks her closer, and for a moment she thinks he means to kiss her again. Instead his black eyes just meet hers, searching. Looking desperately for something. Sansa does not know what.

But she does not allow her eyes to break from his, and when she moves to take her hands from his and place them on his cheeks—her bloodstained hands on his bloodstained cheeks, they are both unclean—he lets her. The nerves of her shoulder are on fire, but she does not break contact.

“I will go with you,” she murmurs. “I will go. We will go now.”

He breathes, shoulders crumping.

“We can go. We can both go. Everything will be okay.”

She tries to believe the words coming out of her mouth, but Sandor Clegane is her last chance out of the White House alive.  
  


* * *

  
She does not scream when she feels the knife against her throat.

Clegane had gone before her downstairs, to the basement—they were going to go out the servant’s entrance. Even drunk, he was not completely useless. He would only be gone a minute, he said. They had gone up to the third floor when the fighting had broken through downstairs and began boiling up. Up and over and then down, he had said. That was their plan. And then they would run. He would carry her, he said, if he had to, off the grounds and they would go down the GW campus and then they would walk through the metro if it wasn’t fallen yet and they would go to Stannis and surrender in Maryland.

That was the plan.

Sansa Stark was a girl who had so many plans.

Sansa Stark is a woman who just wants to  _live._

“Ma’am?” she asks, feeling hot tears escape, falling freely down her cheeks.

"Very good, dear." The first lady leans in close, locking her arm around her. "You want to practice those tears. You'll need them for Stannis. Although I thought I told you to get a knife. You'll see I have one myself."

Sansa shifts nervously. "Ma’am?"

"Oh, spare me your hollow courtesies. Matters must have reached a desperate strait out there if they need my brother the dwarf to lead them—oh, you hadn’t heard that?—so you might as well take off your mask. I know all about your little treasons in the Rose Garden."

"The Rose Garden?"  _Don't let your voice shake_ , Sansa tells herself, the knife pressing closer against her windpipe.  _She doesn't know, no one knows,_  Hollard promised me, only Littlefinger knew and he hated the first lady. "I've done no treasons. I only visit the Rose Garden to pray."

"For Stannis. Or your brother, it's all the same. Your family. They’re all dead now anyway. You're praying for our defeat. What would you call that, if not treason?"

"I pray for Joffrey," she insisted nervously. She can smell the first lady’s breath, heavy with liquor.

"Why, because he treats you so sweetly?" The first lady brings the edge of the knife to the delicate skin of Sansa’s throat, worrying back and forth. Sansa feels the sting of pain, and a trickle of blood run down her throat. "This is real girl. No hiding, no barring your door. My brother Tyrion isn’t here to protect you from me. Perhaps it will give you the courage to deal with truth for a change."

Cersei sighs, displeased. "When you asked about Agent Payne earlier, I lied to you. Would you like to hear the truth, Sansa? Would you like to know why he's really here?"

She does not dare answer, but it does not matter. The first lady does not wait for a reply. Sansa had not even seen Agent Payne return to the hall, but suddenly there he is, striding from the shadows behind the corner as silent as a cat. He carries his gun unsheathed.

There is blood drying on his shirt, the red already fading to brown. "Tell Miss Sansa why I keep you by us," says Cersei. Sansa can imagine the cruel smile playing across her icy features.

Payne opens his mouth and emits a choking rattle. His acne-scarred face has no expression.

"He's here for us, he says," the first lady explains, stroking the knife up and down Sansa’s neck. She dare not breathe nor move. She prays that Sandor will return soon, her eyes watching the door to the back stairs. She prays he will do it soon, and quietly. She does not doubt that Cersei will slit her throat. "Stannis may take the city and he may take the Oval Office, but I will not suffer him to judge me. I do not mean for him to have us alive."

"Us?" Her voice is high and desperate. All she wants is for Cersei to keep talking.

"You heard me. So perhaps you had best pray again, Sansa, and for a different outcome. The Starks will have no joy from the fall of Lannister, I promise you." She reached out and touched Sansa's hair, brushing it lightly away from her neck. “The Starks will not outlive us. You will fall before I do.”

 _I want to live_ , she thinks desperately.  _I was so close. I want to live._

She lifts herself up onto her toes, ready to throw her head back or her elbow or—

It doesn’t happen in slow-motion. That’s all she can think about, later. It all happens so quickly, too quickly.

She feels the first lady’s scream in her ear, feels her getting ripped back away from her. Sansa’s hands fly to her neck, her fingers curling around the blade of her knife as Cersei is pulled to the side away from her. It cuts into her palms, but she keeps it away from her neck.

“Floor, girl, get to the floor,” he yells, and Sansa throws herself to the rug a whisper before gunshots start sounding out, she turns her head,  looking at Cersei’s body, crumpled to the floor. Sansa whimpers, covering her head with her hands.

She is shaking when it is over, and Clegane lifts her from the floor, and carries her to the basement before finally setting her back on her feet.

“Can you walk?” he asks, looking sober. His face is tired and gaunt, but his eyes are clear. He does not holster his gun. “It’s a straight shot from the door to the gate. A hundred yards.”

“I used to run that in high school,” she whispers blankly, eyes fixed on a point on the opposite side of the room.

Clegane sighs heavily, Sansa feels him cup her chin and make her look at him. “You’re going to be fine. We’re going to get out. Just… follow my lead.”

“It’s over?” she asks.

_It’ll never be over._

“Yes,” he answers simply. “Twenty more minutes, and we’ll be in Bethesda. I’ll deliver you to Baratheon and you’ll be safe. You'll get looked at by one of those fancy Navy doctors. Your shoulder... I’ll make sure of it.”

She nods.

She can’t trust him. She can’t trust anyone.

She takes his arm anyway, and lets him lead her out of the building. This is her choice. It’s risk. She has to take it. She’ll take it with him. She does not have many options for her survival, but he has gotten her this far.

She leaves the grounds of the White House for the first time in months at a sprint, and doesn’t look behind her.  
  


* * *

  
The pawn crosses the board.

Pawn becomes Queen. She looks around, and doesn’t like how she’s gotten there. It is messy, she realizes. It has changed her. She doesn't want it. Not anymore. She wants off the board.   
  


* * *

  
The skyline is soiled with the color of blood, the color of first dawn. 


	4. Epilogue: The Northern Town

She kicks, untangling her legs from the sheets as she tries to escape. Sansa’s bare feet land on solid ground and she can breathe again, pressing one hand to her throat. The bandage is gone, but the neat row of eight stitches along her pale throat remain. They comfort her.

It is over.  
  
“You’re in my bed.”  
  
Sansa sighs, reaching over for the nightstand. She grabs her sling and gently works her arm back into it, shoulder sore and tender five days after the corrective surgery. She looks up at him, then holds her hand out. Sandor gently takes her arm and helps her up, steadying her on her feet before letting go.  
  
“You could have woken me if you wanted me to go,” she says, brushing the wrinkles out of her shirt. Her sleep schedule is so thrown off, between depositions and interviews and testifying in front of what’s left in congress and doctor’s visits and panic attacks and nightmares and her medications. “I’m sorry, I just can’t—I’ll go.”  
  
He rolls his eyes at her. “It’s fine, little bird. Stop with the fucking apologies and give me the remote.”  
  
Sansa turns around, holding her arm tight to her as she gropes around in the sheets for the remote. They’ve both been put up in the Bethesda Marriott, in rooms on opposite sides of the hallway, since they surrendered to Speaker Baratheon the week before, restless and tired and nervous, having only their lawyers and each other (and some duly appointed federal agents) for company. And even now, while Sansa cannot allow herself to fully trust him, she clings to him and his gruff, hard-hearted kindnesses.  
  
She stands up again, handing the black device to him. Clegane sits down on the chair by the desk, switching the TV onto to CNN. Sansa eases herself back down onto his bed, spine straight. She will be a lady in front of him. She is a lady alone, too. A spine of steel is what keeps her together, even after leaving the Lannisters, who now rest inside of federal jail cells, and Cersei, who is handcuffed to her hospital bed.  
  
 _SPECIAL ELECTIONS SET FOR MAY, INTERIM PRESIDENT BARATHEON COMMENTS._  
  
Sandor snorts. “No one wants Stannis Baratheon for their president.”  
  
“Well,” she answers gently, “he’s running anyway.”  
  
The scroll at the bottom of the screen changes.  _DANY TARGARYEN RETURNS FROM UNESCO TRIP TO MIDDLE EAST, DECLARES CANDIDACY._  
  
Sansa clears her throat. “A lot of people are talking about her. It’s out of left field, but the early numbers are in her favor.”  
  
“Her father was bat-shit crazy.” He goes to the minibar and pulls out a bottle of beer, opening it with his bare hand before tossing a bottle of water onto the bed next to Sansa. “So was her brother, before he got himself killed by that commie warlord. Both her brothers. They always tried to pin the other one’s death on Robert.”  
  
“She seems extremely competent though. A little young, but she’s definitely no Washington insider, which is what people will be looking for. She’s fresh-faced, smart, well-spoken. The Middle East loves her, she understands the politics.” She catches his eye, and is relieved when he nods, seemingly listening to her. Sansa twists the bleached hotel sheets in her fingers before continuing.  _He will not hurt me. He’s proven that._  “And her Chief of Staff, Mormont, is good for the game. And she has her sob story—her  _bat-shit crazy_  father and brothers—which they can spin in her favor.”  
  
She hasn’t confronted him about anything. She hasn’t thanked him either. But he seems to serve her now, without even asking, instead of the Lannisters. She is just so  _tired._  
  
She tries not to think about how slimly he avoided arrest, and how nonchalantly he’s accepted that he’ll probably be charged with a few things. She, however, has been cleared of all suspicion of accessory and accomplice and culpability in the death of Peter Baelish.  
  
(She had watched in horror as Sandor wiped down her nail file with bleach and threw it out the window, put her comforter to flame in the bathtub, and moved his body out into the hallway. She was horrified, but thankful.  _They'd clear you in a heartbeat, little bird, but let me save you the trouble._ )   
  
Now she tries to focus on her health and working through the Stark estate with her team of lawyers.  
  
The city is rebuilding, the country is rebuilding. Everyone is wondering how Tywin Lannister managed to orchestrate this—to seize power and tumble the country, or at least the East Coast, into anarchy. The world is talking about the end of America’s reign as the global superpower. They have been humbled.  
  
“You have to be fucking  _kidding_  me,” he snarls, and Sansa shudders, breaking out of her reverie. She looks at him disdainfully, and then sighs as she looks back to the TV.  
  
 _ALL CHARGES AGAINST TYRION LANNISTER DROPPED, WALKS OUT OF LEAVANWORTH._  
  
“The rest of them are charged with treason.”  
  
“And the dwarf walks free. Charming little shit,” he spits, before taking a large swig of beer. His cell phone rings, and he turns it off before even looking at the caller ID.  
  
“Don’t call him that,” Sansa says stiffly. Tyrion Lannister had shown her some form of kindness.  _And he is a human being too, after all._  
  
“What?” he asks, bitterly. “Little shit? Charming?”  
  
“ _Dwarf_ ,” Sansa answers, the phrase  _you know what I am talking about_  hanging deftly in the air.  
  
Clegane snorts again, a harsh and unattractive sound. “What, it’s not politically correct? Fuck that.”  
  
Sansa tightens her fingers in the sheet, a twisted mass in her hands. “You’re horrible.”  
  
“I’m not horrible, little bird. It’s the world that’s horrible.”  
  
Sansa rolls her eyes, and turns herself to face him instead of the television. “The world is horrible and you have allowed it to make you so. Don’t feed me your bullshit.”  
  
She reaches for her laptop on the nightstand, opens it, and turns it on.  
  
Sandor laughs around the rim of the bottle. “The little bird has claws." _You've said that before_ _,_ she wants to jibe. But she's still tired. "And I am horrible, girl.”  
  
“You won’t hurt me,” she answers, typing in her password with quick, practiced fingers. “I sleep in your bed and fold your laundry. You won’t hurt me.”  
  
“No, little bird,” he says with a laugh. “I won’t hurt you.”  
  
“Sansa,” she mutters, opens the chess program on her computer, and starts a new game. “My name is Sansa. Two syllables. Not particularly difficult.” She raises her voice. “And that could have been your lawyer, you know. You can’t just ignore calls. Your sorry ass could go to jail.”  
  
He just keeps laughing at her.  
  
Sansa allows herself to smile, just the smallest bit.  


* * *

  
He brings her to meet with someone that he calls an old associate, after the press continues to chase her and the focus on her grows exponentially—but more specifically, he brings her to Langley the afternoon after the fifth episode brought on by a reporter.  
  
“Varys,” he tells her. “Former Russian national. Met him while I was in the service, worked a couple of ops with him. Known as the Spider, inside intelligence circles.”  
  
“Okay…” she says. “Why are you bringing me here?”  
  
Clegane looks at her dubiously, pressing on the brake of the car as the light in front of them turns yellow. “You’re cleared of all charges, and you're cleared to leave the state. Don’t you want to disappear, lit— _Sansa_ .”  
  
She bites her lip, and nods.  
  
“Then he can help you.”  
  


* * *

  
“Miss Stark.” Agent Varys stands when they enter, smiling at Sandor who scowls at him. “Please, have a seat. You must be exhausted.”  
  
“Thank you, sir,” she says, startled when Sandor helps her into one of the stiff-backed chairs in front of the agent’s desk.  
  
 _Do not trust him_ , Sandor had warned her.  _But he can help you._  
  
 _Why?  
  
He owes me a favor._  
  
“Of course.” The bald man’s smile grows wider. Sansa thinks he means to be unnerving. She smiles back. “You’ve quite become America’s sweetheart.”  
  
Sansa cringes.  
  
“Yes,” Varys says, tone dripping in a perverse form of sympathy. “I had a feeling that’s what brought you here. I am more than willing to help you disappear, Miss Stark. It’d be quite simple.”  
  
“Yes…” She clutches at the arm of her chair with the hand on her good side. “I want to finish my education, but… it’s not feasible. No one’s even sure if Georgetown will open for the spring semester anyway. And I’m not sure if I’d want to stay there anyway. I do not… wish to stay in DC any longer. I cannot. But—”  
  
“You fear that you will be recognized anywhere you go. Of course.” The slimy smile on his face grows, and he reaches for a slim manila folder resting in his inbox. “A young woman like you will be recognized almost anywhere you go. Same with Clegane here, due to his… unfortunate condition. His name, though, may allow him to stay under the radar, since it's not in the papers. How you managed that, Hound, is beyond me. Congratulations, by the way, Captain. I heard you’ve gotten away with fines and probation.”  
  
Sansa looks at him, eyes full of  _you didn’t tell me?_   Sandor doesn’t look at her, his grey eyes trained hard on Varys.  
  
“Anyway, my dear. I must ask: how much do you want to truly disappear?”  
  
Sansa licks her lips, smoothing her face into the cool mask that has been in place for months now, but has been dropped around Sandor. “Very much so.”  
  
“And you, Captain?”  
  
“I left the Navy, Spider,” Clegane growls back at him. "Not Captain anymore."  
  
“Semantics.” Varys dismisses it with a wave of his hand. “Still. My offer?”  
  
“Only if she wants it.” Sandor’s eyes flick to her briefly, Sansa’s fingers clench at the arm of her chair.  
  
“Want what?”  
  
“Clegane has offered to go with you, wherever that may be, in order to protect you.” Varys folds his hands in front of him on his desk. “But  _only if you want it._ ”  
  
Sansa cannot breathe. She is angry. She is also happy, and hopeful, and a tiny bit flattered and even though they haven’t discussed the kiss she is… she is hopeful and more than a little confused. She can see Sandor’s shoulders tensing in her periphery.  
  
“I… I will go with him. Should he want it.”  
  
She looks at him; he nods tersely.  
  
“Good! Good then.” Varys claps his hands together before opening the file and leafing through it. “I have an identity prepared for you, Alayne—”  
  
“No, no,” Sansa interrupts. “I do not wish to change my identity. I’m—I’m Sansa. I am a Stark. And should—should Jon or Arya be alive—I would want them to find me. Please, can you somehow—”  
  
“The CIA is looking for your siblings, Miss Stark,” he breaks in, voice still mostly sympathetic but now hinting at a shade of condescension. “But I will make sure that if they are found that whoever is in charge lets you know.”  
  
“Thank you,” she breathes. “Have you found anything?”  
  
“Nothing on your brother. He went off the grid completely after your father’s arrest. There’s talk that he’s in Norway, though.” He pulls a sheaf of paper out of the folder and slides it across the desk to her. Sansa grabs at it desperately, her sister’s face peering up at her in a grainy surveillance camera still. Sandor’s hand moves towards her in an abortive moment. She squashes down her tears, rubbing her thumb over Arya’s little pointed face. “This was taken at an ATM the night after your father’s arrest. She emptied her account at the Wells Fargo on L Street, between 20th and 21st, and walked off heading across the street. This information did not leave the agency.”  
  
“That’s all you know?” Sansa whispers, blinking furiously.  
  
“Yes,” Varys hands her a tissue from the box on his desk. “For all we know, she could still be in the city, or in Mexico.”  
  
“Canada,” Sansa laughs sadly. “Arya would never go south. She’d go back north.”  
  
Varys’s mouth folds into a thin line resembling a toothless smile. Sansa hands the paper clipped stack of papers back to him, pulling her emotions back under the surface, thankful for the Xanax and other medications now keeping her depression and anxiety in check. “Thank you.”  
  
“You’re welcome. Now, my dear. Details.”  
  
Sansa smiles wanly. “Yes. Details.”  
  
“I have arranged for the two of you to move into a former safe house in Homer, Alaska,” he starts, passing her a print out of a real estate listing for a two bedroom split-level on the water.  
  
“Former?” Clegane questions in a hard voice.  
  
Varys smiles at him. Sansa is finding herself rapidly growing tired of his smiles. “Former. It was not comprised. Just no longer needed for our purposes.”  
  
“Okay.” Sansa cuts Sandor off when she sees him about to open his mouth to retort. “So it’s safe?”  
  
“And already well-secured. There are currently no threats against your person, but that is always a… possibility. We’ll be able to protect both of you there.”  
  
Sansa looks at Sandor, who gives curt nod.  
  
“And I know that you don’t want to change your name, Miss Stark, but your surname must at least be changed. You cannot be Sansa Stark, even hidden away in a tiny last-stop hamlet at the edge of the Alaskan peninsula.”  
  
Sansa nods her head, acquiescing.  
  
“Clegane will be fine," Varys adds.   
  
“We know, Spider,” Sandor says. “Nobody knows who the fuck I am.”  
  
Varys gives a high, tittering laugh. “I don’t think you understand me.”  
  
“Then what the fuck are you talking about?”  
  
“You’ll be posing as a married couple. Congratulations,  _Mr. and Mrs. Clegane_.”


End file.
